All a work of art can do is present the surface. I can't know the insides of people. I know very little about the inside of myself.

I like ideas. I find them more exciting than human behavior for the most part.

For memory, we use our imagination. We take a few strands of real time and carry them with us, then like an oyster we create a pearl around them.

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

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.

There are times, they occur with increasing frequency nowadays, when I seem to know nothing, when everything I know seems to have fallen out of my mind like a shower of rain, and I am gripped for a moment in paralysed dismay, waiting for it all to come back but with no certainty that it will.

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