I learned early and at that kitchen table that there are ways of avoiding, without guilt, the commitments of love.

A letter is paradoxically the most revealing and the most deceptive of confessional revelations. We all have our inconsistencies, prejudices, irrationalities which, although strongly felt at the time, may be transitory. A letter captures the mood of the moment. The transitory becomes immutably fixed, part of the evidence for the prosecution or the defence.

Crime fiction confirms our belief, despite some evidence to the contrary, that we live in a rational, comprehensible, and moral universe.

The world of the terminally ill is the world of neither the living nor the dead. I have watched others since I watched my father, and always with a sense of their strangeness. They sit and speak, and are spoken to, and listen, and even smile, but in spirit they have already moved away from us and there is no way we can enter their shadowy no-man’s-land.

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

Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past; without hope of a future he becomes a beast.

Youth goes caparisoned in immortality.