So why not become a mongrel? It's healthy

I've always had a great fondness for English detective fiction such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.

Love isn't about when you first meet. It's about the many, many years you spend together, when you're trying to keep that flame burning.

What is pertinent is the calmness of beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as though the land knows of its own beauty, its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it.

Typically in my novels the narrator tells a story by remembering, and the memories are colored by this and colored by that. So the whole universe of the novel tends to be framed by the narrator's memories and thoughts.

It had never occurred to me that our lives, which had been so closely interwoven, could unravel with such speed.

One is not struck by the truth until prompted quite accidentally by some external event.