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" In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety. "

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" To look at ourselves from afar, to make the subjective suddenly objective: this gives us a psychic shock. "

" The ways in which a book, once read, stays (and changes) in the reader's mind are unpredictable. "

" 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. "

" Grief seems at first to destroy not just all patterns, but also to destroy a belief that a pattern exists. "

" Often the grind of book promotion wearies you of your own book - though at the same time this frees you from its clutches. "

" 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. "

" Most of us remember adolescence as a kind of double negative: no longer allowed to be children, we are not yet capable of being adults. "

" I'm a complete democrat in terms of who buys my books. "

" I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious, I really hate it. "

" The land of embarrassment and breakfast. "

" 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. "

" In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art. "

" 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. "

" All bad things are exaggerated in the middle of the night. When you lie awake, you only think of bad things. "

" 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. "

" When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. "

" I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation. "

Self-Preservation

" In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence. "

" 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'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless they're attached to people. "

" Well, to be honest I think I tell less truth when I write journalism than when I write fiction. "

" There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers - there always were. "

" Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you, life where things aren't. "

" 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? "

The Most Important

" 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! "

" Paris is certainly one of the most boastful of cities, and you could argue that it has had a lot to boast about: at various times the European centre of power, of civilisation, of the arts, and (self-advertisingly, at least) of love. "