Writer

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.

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

When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it.

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.

I'm a complete democrat in terms of who buys my books.

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

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

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.

To look at ourselves from afar, to make the subjective suddenly objective: this gives us a psychic shock.

I'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless they're attached to people.

I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation.

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?

Very few of my characters are based on people I've known. It is too constricting.

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.

I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious, I really hate it.

Well, to be honest I think I tell less truth when I write journalism than when I write fiction.

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.

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.

In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.