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

Sometimes you find the panel, but it doesn’t open; sometimes it opens, and your gaze meets nothing but a mouse skeleton. But at least you’ve looked. That’s the real distinction between people: not between those who have secrets and those who don’t, but between those who want to know everything and those who don’t. This search is a sign of love I maintain.

You can put it another way, of course; you always can.

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

If a man cannot tell what he wants to do, then he must find out what he ought to do. If desire has become complicated, then hold fast to duty.

In life, every ending is just the start of another story.

I don't believe in God, but I miss him.