When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it.

Pride makes us long for a solution to things – a solution, a purpose, a final cause; but the better telescopes become, the more stars appear.

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.

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.

He feared me as many men fear women: because their mistresses (or their wives) understand them. They are scarcely adult, some men: they wish women to understand them, and to that end they tell them all their secrets; and then, when they are properly understood, they hate their women for understanding them.

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

Perhaps love is essential because it's unnecessary.