The telephone ringing gave me a dreadful start. I have never got used to this machine, the way it crouches so malevolently, ready to start clamouring for attention when you least expect it, like a mad baby.

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

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

These days I must take the world in small and carefully measured doses. It is a sort of homeopathic cure I am undergoing, though I am not certain what this cure is meant to mend. Perhaps I am learning to live amongst the living again. Practising, I mean. But no, that is not it. Being here is just a way of not being anywhere.

I like ideas. I find them more exciting than human behavior for the most part.

Most crime fiction, no matter how 'hard-boiled' or bloodily forensic, is essentially sentimental, for most crime writers are disappointed romantics.

The trouble with you, Vic," he said, "is that you think of the world as a sort of huge museum with too many visitors allowed in.