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

It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.

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.

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?

Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.

Write what you need to write, not what is currently popular or what you think will sell.

I don't want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything.