A plot begins when somebody has something to hide.

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

We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.

Ian McEwan is a very good writer; the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters.

The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.

We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.

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.