A pier is a disappointed bridge; yet stare at it for long enough and you can dream it to the other side of the Channel.

Life is like invading Russia. A blitz start, massed shakos, plumes dancing like a flustered henhouse; a period of svelte progress recorded in ebullient despatches as the enemy falls back; then the beginning of a long, morale-sapping trudge with rations getting shorter and the first snowflakes upon your face. The enemy burns Moscow and you yield to General January, whose fingernails are very icicles. Bitter retreat. Harrying Cossacks. Eventually you fall beneath a boy-gunner's grapeshot while crossing some Polish river not even marked on your general's map.

This was long before the term 'single-parent family' came into use; back then it was a 'broken home'.

History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.

As I've explained to my wife many times, you have to kill your wife or mistress to get on the front page of the papers.

I'm one of those writers who started off writing novels and came to writing short stories later, partly because I didn't have the right ideas, partly because I think that short stories are more difficult. I think learning to write short stories also made me attracted toward a paring down of the novel form.

He didn’t really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself.