I actually remember feeling delight, at two o’clock in the morning, when the baby woke for his feed, because I so longed to have another look at him.

Doing a jigsaw was not an intelligence test, or a personality assesment programme; it was a pursuit that lay somewhere between creation and imitation and discovery and reverie.

Maybe the human species has evolved too far, maybe we all move around too much, too pointlessly, and consciousness will implode upon itself.

Mid-life crises, in Fran’s ageing view, are a luxury compared with what she has seen of end-of-life crises.

One wouldn’t want to be responsible for the end, but one might like to be there and know it was all over, the whole bang stupid pointless unnecessarily painful experiment.

Learning was so dangerous: for how could one tell in advance, while still ignorant, whether a thing could ever be unlearned or forgotten, or if, once known and named, it would invalidate by its significance the whole of one’s former life, all of those years wiped out, convicted at one blow, retrospectively darkened by one sudden light?

I let him go, without a word about any other meeting, though he was the one thing I wanted to keep: I wanted him in my bed all night, asleep on my pillow, and I might have had him, but I said nothing.

Happiness is for those who can live in a warm climate.

What really annoys me are the ones who write to say, I am doing your book for my final examinations and could you please tell me what the meaning of it is. I find it just so staggering – that you’re supposed to explain the meaning of your book to some total stranger! If I knew what the meanings of my books were, I wouldn’t have bothered to write them.

And there isn’t any way that one can get rid of the guilt of having a nice body by saying that one can serve society with it, because that would end up with oneself as what? There simply doesn’t seem to be any moral place for flesh.