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

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.

Doing what you do well is death. Your duty is to keep trying to do things that you don't do well, in the hope of learning.

Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.

I live in Dublin, God knows why. There are greatly more congenial places I could have settled in - Italy, France, Manhattan - but I like the climate here, and Irish light seems to be essential for me and for my writing.

All my life I have lied. I lied to escape, I lied to be loved, I lied for placement and power; I lied to lie. It was a way of living; lies are life's almost-anagram.