Half the world's work is done by hopeless neurotics.

Culturally, the First World War is the war that stands in for other wars.

Fiction should be about moral dilemmas that are so bloody difficult that the author doesn't know the answer. What I hate in fiction is when the author knows better than the characters what they should do.

We are Craiglockhart's success stories. Look at us. We don't remember, we don't feel, we don't think - at least beyond the confines of what's needed to do the job. By any proper civilized standard (but what does that mean now?) we are objects of horror. But our nerves are completely steady. And we are still alive.

Murder is only killing in the wrong place.

Another person's life, observed from the outside, always has a shape and definition that one's own life lacks.

The result was I went nowhere.