Certainly I had a really terrible time with 'Emotionally Weird.' When I finished it, I thought, 'I can't write any more.'

Everyone said, 'Well, you're very old for a first novel,' and I said, 'How do you write when you haven't lived? How do you write when you have no experience? How do you write straight out of university?'

Best always to praise rather than criticize.

As you got older and time went on, you realized that the distinction between truth and fiction didn’t really matter because eventually everything disappeared into the soupy, amnesiac mess of history. Personal or political, it made no difference.

Don’t you wonder sometimes,′ Ursula said. ‘If just one small thing had been changed, in the past, I mean. If Hitler had died at birth, or if someone had kidnapped him as a baby and brought him up in – I don’t know, say, a Quaker household – surely things would be different.

It was the war, Juliet thought, remembering the photograph of the flamingo’s creased wife, it has made refugees of us all.

There were different categories of friends in Vince’s opinion. Golf friends, work friends, old school friends, shipboard friends... but friend friends were harder to come by.

Another day where nothing has happened, he thought. That was a good thing, he reminded himself. What was the Chinese curse? May you live in interesting times.

What did science ever do for the world, apart from make better ways of killing people?” Sylvie said.

It just went to show, you never knew what you were going to feel until you felt it.