Faith is the enemy of discovery.

You can tell nothing from a man's appearance, nothing except the depths of your own prejudice.

Most of those people who saw themselves as literary types at university became bank managers.

Grief and guilt. A powerful combination. Guilt like a liquid, a thin liquor, seeping everywhere, informing everything, saturating the whole-corrosive, like seawater, scented with the rich stench of ordure and corruption, and carrying with it hard, abrasive shards of grief.

Sin is absence of God. Nothing more, nothing less.

If God resides anywhere ... surely he shelters behind barricades of pure chance.

Sometimes I think that novelists suffer from P.C.S.: Perpetual Childhood Syndrome.