Looking back into childhood is like looking into a semi-transparent globe within which people and places lie embedded. A shake - and they stir, rise up, circle in inter-weaving groups, then settle down again.

In a corner of the churchyard grew a plantation of white violets, enormously plump and prosperous-looking. ... I saw the dead stretched out under me in the earth, feeding these flowers with a thin milk drawn from their bones.

One must have the humility and the imagination to honor all deep human experiences - not least those one has never come near to sharing.

Convention is another name for the habits of society.

[On Ian Fleming:] The trouble with Ian is that he gets off with women because he can't get on with them.

anything that becomes a cult, or a mass movement, loses its moral and spiritual value. The crusade has to be personal, individual. As soon as it becomes collective it loses its purpose.

People have been saying the novel is dead for as far back as I can remember. The novel will never die, but it will keep changing and evolving and taking different shapes. Storytelling, which is the basis of the novel, has always existed and always will.