In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.

Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Perhaps love is essential because it's unnecessary.

When you are writing fiction your task is to reflect the fullest complications of the world

When we're young, everyone over the age of thirty looks middle-aged, everyone over fifty antique. And time, as it goes by, confirms that we weren't that wrong. Those little age differentials, so crucial and so gross when we are young erode. We end up all belonging to the same category, that of the non-young. I've never much minded this myself.

And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.

Iconic Paris tells us: here are our three-star attractions, go thou and marvel. And so we gaze obediently at what we are told to gaze at, without exactly asking why.