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.

And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.

No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.

Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it.

The novel is resilient, and so are novelists.

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

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.