Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruin.

A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.

There is no point in regretting any part of the past. The past can't now be altered, the future has yet to be lived, and consciously to experience every moment of the present is the only way to gain at least the illusion of immortality.

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?

If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.

We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life.

Write what you need to write, not what is currently popular or what you think will sell.