I was the basest of readers. All I wanted was my own world, and myself in it, given back to me in artful shapes and accessible form.

This is how the entire course of a life can be changed - by doing nothing.

She lay in the dark and knew everything.

There's a taste in the air, sweet and vaguely antiseptic, that reminds him of his teenage years in these streets, and of a general state of longing, a hunger for life to begin that from this distance seems like happiness.

There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust.

No emergency was ever dealt with effectively by democratic process.

Self-consciousness is the destroyer of erotic joy.