These days I must take the world in small and carefully measured doses. It is a sort of homeopathic cure I am undergoing, though I am not certain what this cure is meant to mend. Perhaps I am learning to live amongst the living again. Practising, I mean. But no, that is not it. Being here is just a way of not being anywhere.

A man is not much if he can't depend on himself, and nothing if others can't depend on him.

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

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

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

Ian McEwan is a very good writer; the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters.

I shall strip away layer after layer of grime -- the toffee-colored varnish and caked soot left by a lifetime of dissembling -- until I come to the very thing itself and know it for what it is. My soul. My self.