“Each morning the light came through the slats of the shutters in ripples, and as it washed towards the inhabitants of the Casa Luna it smoothed away memories of the past, It was for this that they ...”

“He had heard the voice of London that lives and breathes beneath the rumble of traffic, a voice like the continual high-pitched shriek you hear when you put your head beneath the waves of the sea. ...”

“Mostly, what people mean by love is laziness.”

“There was a certain usefulness in having a husband whom most people could barely tolerate: it deflected envy, for one thing.”

“Novelists, said Ivo, are to the nineties what cooks were to the eighties, hairdressers to the seventies and pop-stars to the sixties Merely, you know, an expression of the Zeitgeist, Nobody actuall...”

“A hundred years ago, people had perfectly understood that you could die of a broken heart, now they thought you were making a fuss about nothingCertain kinds of suffering are like radiation: they c...”

“Every profession is an island whose inhabitants earn a precarious living by taking in each other’s washing.”

“Thats when I first learned that it wasnt enough to just do your job, you had to have an interest in it, even a passion for it.”

“Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”

“Being by his faith replaced afresh in paradise and created anew, he (the believer)does not need works for his justification, but that he may not be idle, but that he may exercise his own body and p...”

“You should not confuse your career with your life.”

“In a profession, members are only partly guided by service to the public.”

“The grandeur of a profession is...above all, uniting men: there is only one true luxury, that of human relationships.”