The white May blossom swooned slowly into the open mouth of the grave.

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

Life is tragic but it's equally comic.

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

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 read Nietzsche when I was a teenager and then I went back to reading him when I was in my thirties, and his voice spoke directly to me. Nietzsche is such a superb literary artist.

When I finish a sentence, after much labor, it's finished. A certain point comes at which you can't do any more work on it because you know it will kill the sentence.