Mort was already aware that love made you feel hot and cold and cruel and weak, but he hadn't realized that it could make you stupid.

It was nice to hear the voices of little children at play, provided you took care to be far enough away not to hear what they were actually saying.

They didn't know why these things were funny. Sometimes you laugh because you've got no more room for crying. Sometimes you laugh because table manners on a beach are funny. And sometimes you laugh because you're alive, when you really shouldn't be.

I read anything that’s going to be interesting. But you don’t know what it is until you’ve read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there’ll be the making of a novel.

I [...] vowed that rather than let Alzheimer's take me, I would take it. I would live my life as ever to the full and die, ­before the disease mounted its last ­attack, in my own home, in a chair on the lawn, with a brandy in my hand to wash down whatever modern ­version of the "Brompton cocktail" some ­helpful medic could supply. And with ­Thomas Tallis on my iPod, I would shake hands with Death.

He'd always known that the world was an interesting place, and his imagination had peopled it with pirates and bandits and spies and astronauts and similar. But he'd also had a nagging suspicion that, when you seriously got right down to it, they were all just things in books and didn't properly exist anymore.

There's one thing you can say for air pollution, you get utterly amazing sunrises.