Perfect love may cast our fear, but fear is remarkably potent in casting out love.

Death ... obliterates family resemblance as it does personality: there is no affinity between the living and the dead.

Not so much two ships passing in the night as two ships sailing together for a time but always bound for different ports.

It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.

Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of other ­people. Nothing that happens to a writer – however happy, however tragic – is ever wasted.

I wonder if childhood is ever really happy. Just as well, perhaps. To be blissfully happy so young would leave one always seeking to recapture the unobtainable. Like those people who were always happiest at school or university. Always going back. No reunion ever missed. It always seemed to me rather pathetic.

I don't think writers choose the genre, the genre chooses us. I wrote out of the wish to create order out of disorder, the liking of a pattern.