If you live in a place for long you cease to read about it.

I aim to be content with what I produce. It's an aim I never achieve, but I go over my work word by word, time and again, so as to be as little dissatisfied as possible.

I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil.

So long as one is happy one can endure any discipline: it was unhappiness that broke down the habits of work.

Thrillers are like life, more like life than you are.

Like the characters in Chekhov, they have no reserves -– you learn the most intimate secrets. You get an impression of a world peopled by eccentrics, of odd professions, almost incredible stupidities, and, to balance them, amazing endurances.

We are all of us resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.