“Write what you need to write, not what is currently popular or what you think will sell.”

“But what do you believe? I don't just mean religion. What are you sure of?""That once I was not and that now I am. That one day I shall no longer be.”

“What about his style?" asked Dalgliesh who was beginning to think that his reading had been unnecessarily restricted."Turgid but grammatical. And, in these days, when every illiterate debutante thinks she is a novelist, who am I to quarrel with that? Written with Fowler on his left hand and Roget on his right. Stale, flat and, alas, rapidly becoming unprofitable...""What was he like as a person?" asked Dalgliesh."Oh, difficult. Very difficult, poor fellow! I thought you knew him? A precise, self-opinionated, nervous little man perpetually fretting about his sales, his publicity or his book jackets. He overvalued his own talent and undervalued everyone else's, which didn't exactly make for popularity.""A typical writer, in fact?" suggested Dalgliesh mischievously.”

“I am fifty years old and I have never known what it is to love. I can write those words, know them to be true, but feel only the regret that a tone-deaf man must feel because he can't appreicate music, a regret less keen because it is for something never known, not for something lost.”

“It shows considerable wisdom to know what you want in life and then to direct all your energies towards getting it.”

“Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.”

“What mattered at fifty-eight was what had mattered at eighteen: breeding and good bone structure.”