The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.

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

What I was afraid of was my own grief, the weight of it, the ineluctable corrosive force of it, and the stark awareness I had of being, for the first time in my life, entirely alone, a Crusoe shipwrecked and stranded in the limitless wastes of a boundless and indifferent ocean.

If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.

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

Poetry is that magic which consists in awakening sensations with the help of a combination of sounds ... that sorcery by which ideas are necessarily communicated to us, in a definite way, by words which nevertheless do not express them.

With the crime novels, its delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. Its like having a fictitious family.