"Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm."

"God save us always," I said, "from the innocent and the good."

"As long as one suffers one lives."

"The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belong to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity."

"And all that time I couldn’t work. So much of a novelist’s writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on the paper. We remember details of our story, we do not invent them. War didn’t trouble those deep sea-caves, but not there was something of infinitely greater importance to me than war, than my novel – the end of love. That was being worked out not, like a story: the pointed word that sent her crying, that seemed to have come so spontaneously to the lips, had been sharpened in those underwater caverns. My novel lagged, but my love hurried like inspiration to the end."

"Have you seen a room from which faith has gone?...Like a marriage from which love has gone...And patience, patience everywhere like a fog."

"I was trying to write a book that simply would not come. I did my daily five hundred words, but the characters never began to live. So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one’s days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and change conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends. But this hate and suspicion, this passion to destroy went deeper than the book – the unconscious worked on it instead…"

"Sometimes I see myself reflected too closely in other men for comfort, and then I have an enormous wish to believe in the saints, in heroic virtue."

"To me comfort is like the wrong memory at the wrong place or time: if one is lonely one prefers discomfort."

"A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment from which to look back or from which to look ahead."

"I sat on my bed and I said to God: You've taken her, but you haven't got me yet. I know Your cunning. It's You who take us up to a high place and offer us the whole universe. You're a devil, God, tempting us to leap. But I don't want Your peace and I don't want Your love. I wanted something very simple and very easy: I wanted Sarah for a lifetime and You took her away. With Your great schemes You ruin our happiness like a harvester ruins a mouse's nest: I hate You, God, I hate You as though You existed."

"If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?"

"We do not choose our concerns."

"No danger anywhere, it seemed to Rollo Martins of that sudden reckless moment when the scent of hair or a hand against the side alters life."

"We never get accustomed to being less important to other people than they are to us — Martins felt the little jab of dispensability."

"The hands of the guilty don't necessarily tremble; only in stories does a dropped glass betray agitation. Tension is more often shown in the studied action."

"People don't like reality, they don't like common sense, until age forces it on them."

"In childhood we live under the brightness of immortality — heaven is as near and actual as the seaside. Behind the complicated details of the world stand the simplicities: God is good, the grown-up man or woman knows the answer to every question, there is such a thing as truth, and justice is as measured and faultless as a clock. Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhood—for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory with experience; they are formed out of our own disappointing memories."

"A murderer is regarded by the conventional world as something almost monstrous, but a murderer to himself is only an ordinary man.... It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be regarded as monstrous."

"Thrillers are like life—more like life than you are … it’s what we’ve all made of the world."

"It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself."

"Why, after all, should we expect God to punish the innocent with more life?"

"When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity— that was a quality God's image carried with it."

"There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in."

"I suppose the love of life which periodically deserts most men was returning: like sexual desire, it moves in cycles."

"But the great moment was over — here in Orizaba it was like Galilee between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection — all the enthusiasm had been spent."

"The old lady knelt, saying her 'Hail Mary'; She didn't believe — but among Catholics even the sceptical are courteous."

"Its typical of Mexico, of the whole human race perhaps — violence in favour of an ideal and then the ideal lost but the violence just going on."

"Perhaps his laughter saved them — it must be difficult to shoot a laughing man: you have to feel important to kill."

"[Cubitt hurling insults at Pinky after he refuses to lend him money] The picture Cubitt drew had got nothing to do with him: it was like the pictures men drew of Christ, the image of their own sentimentality. ...He was like a professor describing to a stranger some place he had only read in books:...when all the time it was a country the stranger knew..."

"People talk," Ida Arnold said. "People talk all the time."

"He knew everything in theory, nothing in practice... He knew the moves, he'd never played the game."

"Life was a series of complicated tactical exercises ..."

"...he knew there wasn't a soul in the mob he could trust – except perhaps Dallow. That didn't matter. You couldn't make mistakes when you trusted nobody."

"...the Boy sat silent. It was he this time who was being warned: life held the vitriol bottle and warned him: I'll spoil your looks."

"You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the … appalling … strangeness of the mercy of God."

"[Rose, taken out for the evening by Pinkie] She had an immense store of trivial memories and when she wasn't living in the future she was living in the past. As for the present – she got through that as quickly as she could, running away from things, running towards things, so that her voice was always a little breathless, her heart pounding at an escape or an expectation."

"[About Pinkie's inability to empathise] The imagination hadn't awoken. That was his strength. He couldn't see through other people's eyes, or feel with their nerves. Only the music made him uneasy."

"[About Pinkie's character] The word murder conveyed no more to him than the word 'box', 'collar', 'giraffe'."

"Man is made by the places in which he lives..."

"[After Hale's cremation] She came out of the crematorium, and there from the twin towers above her head fumed the very last of Fred, a thin stream of grey smoke from the ovens. Fred dropped indistinguishable grey ash on the pink blossoms: he became part of the smoke nuisance over London, and Ida wept."

"[Priest at Hale's cremation] "...our brother is at this moment reabsorbed in the universal spirit.""

"… it was the little things which tripped you up."

"[Ida] "...It's a good world if you don't weaken.""

"The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn. Perhaps the comparison is closer to the Chinese cook who leaves hardly any part of a duck unserved."

"[Re Hale] He only felt his loneliness after his third gin."

"There is not so much virginity in the world that one can afford not to love when one finds it."

"Success is more dangerous than failure, the ripples break over a wider coastline."

"The trouble is I don't believe my unbelief."

"You think it more difficult to turn air into wine than to turn wine into blood?"