We artists love to talk tough, but we're just as sentimental as everyone else when it comes down to it.

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

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

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

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

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.

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