I've never had a moment's doubt. I love you. I believe in you completely. You are my dearest one. My reason for life.

Love doesn't grow at a steady rate, but advances in surges, bolts, wild leaps, and this was one of those.

For the professors in the academy, for the humanities generally, misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack.

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.

I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction.

...beauty, she had discovered occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the hand, had infinite variation.

It was common enough, to see so much death and want a child. Common, therefore human, and he wanted it all the more. When the wounded were screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, of an ordinary life, a family line, connection.