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.

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.

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

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.

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

Do we tend to recall the most important parts of a novel or those that speak most directly to us, the truest lines or the flashiest ones?

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

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'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.

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.

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.

Often the grind of book promotion wearies you of your own book - though at the same time this frees you from its clutches.

The land of embarrassment and breakfast.

The ways in which a book, once read, stays (and changes) in the reader's mind are unpredictable.

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