I still occasionally need to struggle but I now fear it less. The weapons I fight it with are also my consolations: books, music, food, wine, nature.

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

We live in a society which salves its conscience more by helping the interestingly unfortunate than the dull deserving.

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.

For me, the dead remain dead. If I couldn't believe that, I don't think I could go on living.

First-class travel, provided one hasn't to pay for it oneself, is the most insidiously addictive of life's luxuries.

however long we have to live, there are never enough springs.