The tension between 'yes' and 'no', between 'I can' and 'I cannot', makes us feel that, in so many instances, human life is an interminable debate with one's self.

I wanted to discuss my life with him not as a patient talking to an analyst but as if we were two literary critics discussing a novel... I had a literature rather than a personality, a set of fictions about myself.

I’m filled with desire – to live, to write, to do everything. Desire itself is a kind of immortality.

Either a writer doesn’t want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want.

Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader’s teeth.

The contents of someone’s bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.

If a book is really good, it deserves to be read again, and if it’s great, it should be read at least three times.

We don’t simply read books. We become them.

A bookcase is as good as a view, as much of a panorama as the sight of a city or a river. There are dawns and sunsets in books – storms and zephyrs.

I remember a table in BarchesterTowers that had more character than the combined heroes of three recent novels I’ve read.