"...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."

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

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

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

"[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."

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

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

"...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."

"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."

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

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

"I want so much to cling to something solid and steady."

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

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

"In fact, the real problem with the thesis of A Genealogy of Morals is that the noble and the aristocrat are just as likely to be stupid as the plebeian. I had noted in my teens that major writers are usually those who have had to struggle against the odds — to "pull their cart out of the mud," as I put it — while writers who have had an easy start in life are usually second rate — or at least, not quite first-rate. Dickens, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Shaw, H. G. Wells, are examples of the first kind; in the twentieth century, John Galsworthy, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and Samuel Beckett are examples of the second kind. They are far from being mediocre writers; yet they tend to be tinged with a certain pessimism that arises from never having achieved a certain resistance against problems."

"Graham Greene is unique-a questing lucidity that no other writer in the English language can come near. Why hasn't he got the Nobel Prize? We have all learned so much from him, as writers and readers."

"Greene, we agreed, is a Jekyll and Hyde character, who has not succeeded in fusing the two sides of himself into any kind of harmony. There is conflict within him, and therefore he is liable to pursue conflict without."

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

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

"Barbara wrote that his brain frightened her. It was sharp and clear and cruel. She admired him for being always unsentimental, but noted 'always remember to rely on yourself … if you are in a sticky place he will be so interested in noting your reactions that he will probably forget to rescue you.'"

"There's a virtue in slowness, which we have lost"

"Under my cloak, a fig for the King!"

"The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him."

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

"Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and the simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt."

"Can you hate something you don't believe in? And yet he called himself a free-thinker. What an impossible paradox, to be free and to be so obsessed."

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

"Death will come in any case, and there is a long afterwards if the priests are right and nothing to fear if they are wrong."

"At the end of what is called the "sexual life" the only love which has lasted is the love which has everything, every disappointment, every failure and every betrayal, which has accepted even the sad fact that in the end there is no desire so deep as the simple desire for companionship."

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

"It was not the kind of surroundings in which any one with free will — if such a man existed — would have chosen to await death."

"Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully."

"I had very good dentures once. Some magnificent gold work. It’s the only form of jewelry a man can wear that women fully appreciate."

"Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought."

"The world is not black and white. More like black and grey."

"There is a point of no return, unremarked at the time, in most lives."

"God...created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed — that is the meaning of evolution."

"[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."

"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."

"It was an evening which, by some mysterious combination of failing light and the smell of an unrecognised plant, brings back to some men the sense of childhood and of future hope and to others the sense of something which has been lost and almost forgotten."

"A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction."

"That instinct for human character that is perhaps inherent in an imaginative writer."

"Communism, my friend, is more than Marxism, just as Catholicism … is more than the Roman Curia. There is a mystique as well as a politique....Catholics and communists have commited great crimes, but at least they have not stood aside, like an established society, and been indifferent. I would rather have blood on my hands than water like Pilate...if you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask?"

"My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane."

"Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human condition."

"Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered."

"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."

"It is the story-teller's task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval."

"A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious."