to look back on one's life is to experience the capriciousness of memory. ... the past is not static. It can be relived only in memory, and memory is a device for forgetting as well as remembering. It, too, is not immutable. It rediscovers, reinvents, reorganizes. Like a passage of prose it can be revised and repunctuated. To that extent, every autobiography is a work of fiction and every work of fiction an autobiography.

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

gossip ... was like any other commodity in the marketplace. You received it only if you had something of value to give.

Youth goes caparisoned in immortality.

Old age makes caricatures of us all.

The world is changed not by the self-regarding, but by men and women prepared to make fools of themselves.

He didn't want her; he wanted me. Well, you know how it is." Dalgliesh did know. This, after all, was the commonest, the most banal of personal tragedies. You loved someone. They didn't love you. Worse still, in defiance of their own best interests and to the destruction of your peace, they loved another. What would half the world's poets and novelists do without this universal tragicomedy?