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" Very few of my characters are based on people I've known. It is too constricting. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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! "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" The land of embarrassment and breakfast. "

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

" 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. "

" 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

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