Charm is always genuine; it may be superficial but it isn't false.

A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.

A man who lives with nature is used to violence and is companionable with death. There is more violence in an English hedgerow than in the meanest streets of a great city.

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

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.

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?

Creativity doesn't flourish in an atmosphere of despotism, coercion and fear.