We English are good at forgiving our enemies; it releases us from the obligation of liking our friends.

you'd like the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. That must be the most futile oath anyone ever swears.

What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.

Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of other ­people. Nothing that happens to a writer – however happy, however tragic – is ever wasted.

I knew the facts of death before I knew the facts of life. There never was a time when I didn't see the skull beneath the skin.

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.

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.