“Power brings a man many luxuries, but a clean pair of hands is seldom among them.”

“People will perish, but books are immortal. (Pompeii)”

“To say she was my girlfriend was absurd: no one the wrong side of thirty has a girlfriend… I suppose I ought to have realize it’s ominous that forty thousand years of human language had failed to produce a word for our relationship.”

“Officially it was almost spring but someone had forgotten to pass the news on to winter.”

“Nature has granted man no better gift than the shortness of life. The senses grow dull, the limbs are numb, sight, bearing, gait, even the teeth and alimentary organs die before we do, and yet this period is reckoned a portion of life." - Pg. 82”

“Civilization was a relentless war that man was doomed to lose eventually. - Pg. 195”

“For them, it was just an ordinary miracle.”

“Down in the cellar the Gestapo were licensed to practice was the Ministry of Justice called ‘heightened interrogation’. The rules had been drawn up by civilised men in warm offices and they stipulated the presence of a doctor.”

“People perish. Books are immortal.”

“And the great thing about money is that it doesn’t matter when you harvest it. It’s an all-year crop.”

“A book unwritten is a delightful universe of infinite possibilities. Set down one word, however, and it immediately becomes earthbound. Set down one sentence and it’s halfway to being just like every other bloody book that’s ever been written.”