Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.

The silence of a shut park does not sound like country silence: it is tense and confined.

When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.

That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.

The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet - when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round.

The child lives in the book; but just as much the book lives in the child.

One can suffer a convulsion of one's entire nature, and, unless it makes some noise, no one notices. It's not just that we are incurious; we completely lack any sense of each other's existences.