A work of art like this,’ he tells one of the journalists, ’demands that the life lived in it be a work of art as well. I am certain that Viktor Landauer and his beautiful wife will do the place justice.

Reality is brutal or painful or frightening, but waiting is a distillate of fear that corrodes and dissolves.

The shutter of the photographer’s camera makes that repeated mechanical sound. That unlocking and locking of the doors of light to send momentary images of the present into the light trap of the past.

It is perfectly possible to believe two contradictory things at one and the same time – that is one of the brilliant faculties of the human mind.

It wasn’t the way that Viktor and Katalin looked at each other, it was the way they didn’t look. It wasn’t the notes, it was the silences between the notes.

To be brave, you have to have a choice.

Numbers have no hidden meanings, you say. But it is the hidden meanings in words that make them so wonderful.

You can tell nothing from a man’s appearance, nothing except the depths of your own prejudice.

Most of those people who saw themselves as literary types at university became bank managers.

I was a boarding school product from the age of eight, and I hated it. Though I do have a theory that boarding school is good training for writers because its so desperately lacking in privacy: you make space for yourself by having an interior life.