“A warm sunny evening, the plash and gurgle of the waves in the rock pools, the rush of the cold gin. I thought for the first time of my novel, abandoned, all these years, and I came up, unprompted,...”

“Hot crumpets with butter and jam - what could be more ambrosial?”

“Those of us who have the luck to enjoy good health forget about this vast parallel universe of the unwell-their daily miseries, their banal ordeals. Only when you cross that frontier into the world...”

“It was pleasant - and the sense of otherness was nice, that there were two people involved in this process, that we were each giving something to the other.”

“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect fo...”

“Of all the bright cruel lies they tell you, the cruelest is the one called love.”

“Don't cry, I'm sorry to have deceived you so much, but that's how life is.”

“People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What Ive learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders ones reality to the person to whom one lies, making tha...”

“Before you enbark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.”

“Maybe I could dole out the truth in tiny pieces that, once assembled, would make a picture that resembled a reality in which I hadnt done anything wrong.”