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

Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.

I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.

It's great people still care about books, and it's great you can still fashion a life from literature.

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

Happiness was different in childhood. It was so much then a matter simply of accumulation, of taking things - new experiences, new emotions - and applying them like so many polished tiles to what would someday be the marvellously finished pavilion of the self.

I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.