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

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

Dogs are dim creatures, do not speak to me of their good sense--have you ever heard of a team of tomcats hauling a sled across the frozen wastes?

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.

I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.

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