Sure the priests ran the country back then and they hated women. Oh my God, they hated women and anything that had to do with women and anything to do with women’s bodies or ideas or desires, and any chance that they had to humiliate a woman or bring her down, they would take full advantage of it.

I hope he didn’t suffer too much.” “He did,” she said. “But he was very stoical about it. It’s those of us who are left behind who’ll have to suffer now.

The sensation that for the world to exist with an object of such beauty in it – and for that object to be unattainable – was the very sweetest kind of pain imaginable.

I was a very quiet child, quite introverted, really. Independent, yes; I didn’t need a lot of supervision. Less so than I did when I got older, maybe. But I was a bookish child, not surprisingly. I could sit quite happily in a corner for hours and entertain myself with books.

He knew that sometimes people who were sad didn’t want to be asked about it; sometimes they’d offer the information themselves and sometimes they wouldn’t stop talking about it for months on end, but on this occasion Bruno thought that he should wait before saying anything.

After all, the clamour of the crowded public house is infinitely more welcoming than the stillness of the empty home.

Please don’t embarrass yourself by offering an opinion.

I need to get back to the office. Those windows won’t stare out themselves all afternoon.

With the adult ones, I feel I need to get as deep inside the psychology of a character as I can, and that needs to be first-person. In the children’s books, I feel I need some distance. I don’t want to be the nine-year-old at the center of the story. I need to have some type of narrative voice.

Please don’t let Julian die, I asked God. And please stop me from being a homosexual. Only when I stood up and walked away did I realize that that had been two prayers, so I went back and lit a second candle, which cost me another penny.