It's the best way of telling the truth; it's a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts. Beyond that … [it's] delight in, and play with, language; also, a curiously intimate way of communicating with people whom you will never meet.
To look at ourselves from afar, to make the subjective suddenly objective: this gives us a psychic shock.
Iconic Paris tells us: here are our three-star attractions, go thou and marvel. And so we gaze obediently at what we are told to gaze at, without exactly asking why.
It took me some years to clear my head of what Paris wanted me to admire about it, and to notice what I preferred instead. Not power-ridden monuments, but individual buildings which tell a quieter story: the artist's studio, or the Belle Epoque house built by a forgotten financier for a just-remembered courtesan.
Often the grind of book promotion wearies you of your own book - though at the same time this frees you from its clutches.
In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.
Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.
As I've explained to my wife many times, you have to kill your wife or mistress to get on the front page of the papers.
Do we tend to recall the most important parts of a novel or those that speak most directly to us, the truest lines or the flashiest ones?
What is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.
I am death-fearing. I don't think I'm morbid. That seems to me a fear of death that goes beyond the rational. Whereas it seems to me to be entirely rational to fear death!
When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it.
Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this serious task of imaginative discovery and self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book.
I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation.
I was initially planning to write about grief in terms of Eurydice and the myth thereof. By that point the overall metaphor of height and depth and flat and falling and rising was coming into being in my mind.
In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety.