If you’re that clever you can argue yourself into anything.

In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art.

Women scheme when they are weak, they lie out of fear. Men scheme when they are strong, they lie out of arrogance.

People in love, it is well known, suffer extreme conceptual delusions, the most common of these being that other people find your condition as thrilling and eye-watering as you do yourselves.

To look at ourselves from afar, to make the subjective suddenly objective: this gives us a psychic shock.

I'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless they're attached to people.

You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed.