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.

The land of embarrassment and breakfast.

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

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.

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

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

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!

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

What is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.

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

Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.

Mystification is simple clarity is the hardest thing of all.

The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.

A pier is a disappointed bridge; yet stare at it for long enough and you can dream it to the other side of the Channel.

Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.

When you’re young you prefer the vulgar months, the fullness of the seasons. As you grow older you learn to like the in-between times, the months that can’t make up their minds. Perhaps it’s a way of admitting that things can’t ever bear the same certainty again.

In life, every ending is just the start of another story.

Time give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.

Any judge who allows an adulterer with a live-in girlfriend to terminate the life of his wife should be impeached.

But even with a character like Cary who is relatively outlandish, at the end of the movie he's in a place where I wouldn't have expected him to be - taking on the responsibility of a woman who is pregnant and who used to be his best friend's wife.

A good husband makes a good wife.

The most profound, tangible influence in my life has been my wife, Monique. I don't know that I would even be alive were it not for her, and I certainly would not be the person that I am today.

So I decided to form a production company with my wife and our partner Diane.

I have known more men destroyed by the desire to have wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink and harlots.

Rude contact with facts chased my visions and dreams quickly away, and in their stead I beheld the horrors, the corruption, the evils and hypocrisy of society, and as I stood among them, a young wife, a great wail of agony went out from my soul.

When they were small and my wife really had no other responsibilities, except taking care of the family and all of us, it wasn't that big a deal. It was fun. Hey, we're going to Moscow. We're going to Italy. We're going to Toronto. We're going to New York.

Nothing flatters a man as much as the happiness of his wife; he is always proud of himself as the source of it.

I don't think my wife likes me very much, when I had a heart attack she wrote for an ambulance.

I met David Smith through my former wife, Cornelia, who'd studied with him.

My wife and two children traveled with me on locations all last season.

The comfortable estate of widowhood is the only hope that keeps up a wife's spirits.

Behind every successful man is a woman, behind her is his wife.