For memory, we use our imagination. We take a few strands of real time and carry them with us, then like an oyster we create a pearl around them.

Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.

In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.

All my life I have lied. I lied to escape, I lied to be loved, I lied for placement and power; I lied to lie. It was a way of living; lies are life's almost-anagram.

The past beats inside me like a second heart.

If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.

Everything we do is tinged with the knowledge that this may be the last time that we will do this, and that makes what we're doing incredibly sweet.

We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.

To take possession of a city of which you are not a native you must first fall in love there.

A man is not much if he can't depend on himself, and nothing if others can't depend on him.

Most crime fiction, no matter how 'hard-boiled' or bloodily forensic, is essentially sentimental, for most crime writers are disappointed romantics.

The thing I hate about religion is, they ban what they have done and force us to do what they haven’t done.

Trying to force something is the best way to stop it happening.

I do think how two people dance with each other is indicative of how they feel about each other. It can tell a lot more than a verbal scene.

So slowly in my mind formed the idea of melodrama, a form I found to perfection in American pictures. They were naive, they were that something completely different. They were completely Art-less.

We must be for ourselves in the long run; the mild and generous are only more justly selfish than the domineering.

Greatness is a lot of small things done well.

Most of us have enough areas in our lives where we have to meet others' expectations. Let your running be about your own hopes and dreams.

The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind.

Intellect is a fire; rash and pitiless it melts this wonderful bone-house which is called man. Genius even, as it is the greatestgood, is the greatest harm.

Living from the perspective at which you came from and returning to source really is an act of remembering, rather than an act of learning.