It was like picking a scab off a sore; he actually wanted scar tissue – it would be quite wrong to try and forget, to blank it all out. Every fraught memory that lurked here had played its role: everything he was today was an indirect result of the life he had led then. It confirmed the rightness of every step he had taken.

I know part of my sorrow is just disguised self-pity, I needed that exchange and I worry how I’ll cope without it and whether I can replace it – if only it were as easy as buying a new dog.

Real life is never, never as simple as a movie.

Gabriel thought maps should be banned. They gave the world an order and reasonableness which it did not possess.

There’s a sense in all my novels that nothing is certain.

Because it seems to me that to be human you have to be able to compromise.

Isn’t this how life turns out, more often than not? It refuses to conform to your needs – the narrative needs that you feel are essential to give rough shape to your time on this earth.

She was happy. Her father had always told her to make sure and recognise that state when it arrived, and acknowledge it. ‘It’s like money in the bank, old girl’, he would say...

In the broad spectrum of the arts, two worlds rarely overlap – the literary world and the world of rock music.

As I write this I feel that draining, hollowing helplessness that genuine love for another person produces in you. It’s at these moments that we know we are going to die.