The land of embarrassment and breakfast.

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.

I hope for the day when everyone can speak again of God without embarrassment.

One of the most frightening things about your true nerd, for may people, is not that he's socially inept - because everybody's been there - but rather his complete lack of embarrassment about it.

To my embarrassment I was born in bed with a lady.

I am here today to again apologize for the personal mistakes I have made and the embarrassment I have caused. I make this apology to my neighbors and my constituents, but I make it particularly to my wife, Huma.

The rate at which a person can mature is directly proportional to the embarrassment he can tolerate.

Have you ever gotten the feeling that you aren't completely embarassed yet, but you glimpse tomorrow's embarrassment?

I understand the worries of many - not only here in this auditorium -, and some have already written to me to say that technical progress has lowered the threshold that stops people from helping themselves to protected works without the slightest embarrassment.

You can imagine my embarrassment when I killed the wrong guy.

Well, I mean, you have an emotion, you want to express it. You don't just look in the camera and do it. You want to hide from the embarrassment of your brother saying you're not allowed to come into my town.

I mean, I haven't been around very long. I can't expect everyone to have seen 'The House Bunny'. Oh God. I am having such waves of internal embarrassment, which now I'm admitting on a tape recorder. This is so one of the things I should keep in my head.

It's an embarrassment that we don't have a broad enough consensus among political leaders that true reform should take place. I could count the members of Congress on one hand that took these issues seriously.

Irregular contact with doctors means many men fail to receive any preventive care for potentially life-threatening conditions. In addition, when men do seek care, embarrassment can often prevent them from openly discussing health concerns with their physicians.

Sotomayor's vainglorious lecture bromide about herself as "a wise Latina" trumping white men is a vulgar embarrassment - a vestige of the bad old days of male-bashing feminism.

I used to be a discipline problem, which caused me embarrassment until I realized that being a discipline problem in a racist society is sometimes an honor.