The peculiar foreign superstition that the English do not like love, the evidence being that they do not talk about it.

Prep school, public school, university: these now tedious influences standardize English autobiography, giving the educated Englishman the sad if fascinating appearance of a stuffed bird of sly and beady eye in some old seaside museum. The fixation on school has become a class trait. It manifests itself as a mixture of incurious piety and parlour game.

Like many popular best-sellers, he was a very sad and solemn man who took himself too seriously and his art not seriously enough.

Short stories can be rather stark and bare unless you put in the right details. Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.

I am under the spell of language, which has ruled me since I was 10.

Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.

There is more magic in sin if it is not committed.