Why should anything happen when everything has happened?

In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety.

If you remember your past too well you start blaming your present for it. Look what they did to me, that's what caused me to be like this, it's not my fault. Permit me to correct you: it probably is your fault. And kindly spare me the details.

It took me some years to clear my head of what Paris wanted me to admire about it, and to notice what I preferred instead. Not power-ridden monuments, but individual buildings which tell a quieter story: the artist's studio, or the Belle Epoque house built by a forgotten financier for a just-remembered courtesan.

Reading is a majority skill but a minority art.

Often the grind of book promotion wearies you of your own book - though at the same time this frees you from its clutches.

I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded - and how pitiful that was.