If character is the foreground of fiction, setting is the background, and as in a painting's composition, the foreground may be in harmony or in conflict with the background.

Most writing is done between the mind and the hand, not between the hand and the page.

The human desire to know why is as powerful as the desire to know what happened next, and it is a desire of a higher order.

The only justification for writing a novel is that it should be wonderful. Adequate is inadequate.

What matters is not publication or success (success is bad for your prose) but the practice of the imaginative act. Our damaged values depend on it.

The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring. It is the sensation of rearing and peering from the bent tip of a grass blade, looking for a route.

Part of the trouble is that I've never properly understood that some disasters accumulate, that they don't all land like a child out of an apple tree.

In Literature, only trouble is interesting.

I sit and pass judgment on myself: this is dull, this is unclear, this is insignificant: ergo I am dull, I am unclear, I am insignificant.

What is the pattern of change?

I must write now and quickly, before I begin to prefer the perfect version that lives in my head.

The difficulties of people should be our business.

Duality is always secretly unity.

Messi is on another planet.

Work at being a humble person.

There isn't anybody I won't talk to about immigration - at least once.

There is an increasingly pervasive sense that one age is over and a new one is beginning - in business, in politics, in science, in psychology.

The noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees is the high road that leads him to England.

The most common characteristic of all police states is intimidation by surveillance. Citizens know they are being watched and overheard. Their mail is being examined. Their homes can be invaded.

The private wound is deepest. O time most accurst, 'Mongst all foes that a friend should be the worst!