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?

Any visitor to an historic country town or city quickly becomes aware in his or her peregrinations that the most attractive houses in the centre are invariably the offices of lawyers.

I don't think writers choose the genre, the genre chooses us. I wrote out of the wish to create order out of disorder, the liking of a pattern.

Perfect love may cast our fear, but fear is remarkably potent in casting out love.

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

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

A nation that can't remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for.