A man is not much if he can't depend on himself, and nothing if others can't depend on him.

There are times, they occur with increasing frequency nowadays, when I seem to know nothing, when everything I know seems to have fallen out of my mind like a shower of rain, and I am gripped for a moment in paralysed dismay, waiting for it all to come back but with no certainty that it will.

What is money, after all? Almost nothing, when one has a sufficiency of it.

All a work of art can do is present the surface. I can't know the insides of people. I know very little about the inside of myself.

The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.

When I finish a sentence, after much labor, it's finished. A certain point comes at which you can't do any more work on it because you know it will kill the sentence.

How flat all sounds are at the seaside, flat and yet emphatic, like the sound of gunshots heard at a distance.