“A good writer can watch a cat pad across the street and know what it is to be pounced upon by a Bengal tiger.”

“The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat’s mat is a story.”

“Do you know what love is? I'll tell you: it is whatever you can still betray.”

“What would it be like really and absolutely to believe? (...) To know, really and absolutely know, that there's a Divine Being not set in time or space who reads your thoughts better than you ever did, and probably before you even have them? To believe that God sends you to war, God bends the path of bullets, decides which of his children will die, or have their legs blown off, or make a few hundred million on Wall Street, depending on today's Grand Design? (ch. 14)”

“A good writer is an expert on nothing except himself. And on that subject, if he is wise, he holds his tongue. Some of you may wonder why I am reluctant to submit to interviews on television and radio and in the press. The answer is that nothing that I write is authentic. It is the stuff of dreams, not reality. Yet I am treated by the media as though I wrote espionage handbooks.”

“A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world.”

“It was his shoes, he noticed to his pleasure, that she most objected to; and he thought: bloody good, that's what shoes are for.”