Perhaps it's only when people are dead that we can safely show how much we cared about them. We know that it's too late then for them to do anything about it.

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

No literary form is more revealing, more spontaneous or more individual than a letter.

The world is full of people who have lost faith: politicians who have lost faith in politics, social workers who have lost faith in social work, schoolteachers who have lost faith in teaching and, for all I know, policemen who have lost faith in policing and poets who have lost faith in poetry. It's a condition of faith that it gets lost from time to time, or at least mislaid.

I am fifty years old and I have never known what it is to love. I can write those words, know them to be true, but feel only the regret that a tone-deaf man must feel because he can't appreicate music, a regret less keen because it is for something never known, not for something lost.

Daniel supposed he had a secret life. Most people did; it was hardly possible to live without one.

Absolute nakedness was intrusive, confusing to the senses. Paradoxically, it both revealed and diminished identity.