Writing the last page of a book was as close as he'd ever come to sublimity, and that hadn't happened in four years.

A life of writing books is a trying adventure in which you cannot find out where you are unless you lose your way.

It is a family joke that when I was a tiny child I turned from the window out of which I was watching a snowstorm, and hopefully asked, 'Momma, do we believe in winter?'

It's the little questions from women about tappets that finally push men over the edge.

Satire is moral outrage transformed into comic art.

Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.