It's great people still care about books, and it's great you can still fashion a life from literature.

The novel is resilient, and so are novelists.

Yes, this is what I thought adulthood would be, a kind of long indian summer, a state of tranquility, of calm incuriousness, with nothing left of the barely bearable raw immediacy of childhood, all the things solved that had puzzled me when I was small, all mysteries settled, all questions answered, and the moments dripping away, unnoticed almost, drip by golden drip, toward the final, almost unnoticed, quietus.

I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.

...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left

That's one of the many things I hate about life, that it's a hideously cliched business.

To take possession of a city of which you are not a native you must first fall in love there.