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?

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

Human kindness is like a defective tap, the first gush may be impressive but the stream soon dries up.

When I heard, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, I thought, Did he fall or was he pushed?

Don't just plan to write - write. It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style.

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.

If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.