He couldn't tell that this was one of those occasions a man never forgets: a small cicatrice had been made on the memory, a wound that would ache whenever certain things combined - the taste of gin at mid-day, the smell of flowers under a balcony, the clang of corrugated iron, an ugly bird flopping from perch to perch.

We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them.

Have you seen a room from which faith has gone? Like a marriage from which love has gone. And patience, patience everywhere like a fog.

It's a pity people pick and choose what they learn from the Bible.

When I began to write our story down, I thought I was writing a record of hate, but somehow the hate has got mislaid and all I know is that in spite of her mistakes and her unreliability, she was better than most. It's just as well that one of us should believe in her: she never did in herself.

I wish sometimes you had a few bad motives, you might understand a little more about human beings.

Had Shakespeare listened to the news of Duncans death in a tavern or heard the knocking on his own bedroom door after he had finished the writing of Macbeth?