Of all the things that human beings did together, the sexual act was the one with the most various of reasons.

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?

Publishers don't nurse you; they buy and sell you.

the most successful marriages were always based on both partners feeling that they had done rather well for themselves.

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.

Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch.

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