Quotes from Clifford Thurlow

The grating cry of the muezzin from the mosques at sunrise wakes people from their sleep and puts them on edge for the rest of the day.

Not all the young women recruited to holy war had their feet caned by the moral police. There were those who held the canes.

You can never trust a spy. Even your own.

Killing another human being is not something you get used to. It takes away their life and subtracts something from your own, a fine layer of your humanity.

It doesn't matter how many bombs we drop on the Middle East, how many children are mutilated and killed, the jihadis like the phoenix will rise from the ashes and the refugees and asylum seekers will keep coming. Once they have seen on their mobile phones the way we live, they will look out across their deserts and wastelands and make the journey west.

If in the course of the day you do a good deed for a stranger, that stranger will do a good deed for a stranger who might be you.

Artists often feel sad without knowing why.

Most men are a confusion of half-truths and vanity, of something lost and never completed.

Writing is a virus once caught never to be cured.

The first paragraph is the arrow. The last paragraph is the target.

In Cadaques, time is suspended in such a way that days spent here are not counted in the ageing process.

The secret of getting things done quickly is not to hurry.

It is not surprising that Spain found a need for the word duende. It is the only country where death in the bullring is a national spectacle, the only nation where death is announced by the explosion of trumpets and drums. The bullring, divided in sol y sombre – the light and shade, is the perfect metaphor for life and death, a passing from the light into darkness. Every matador who ever lived had duende and no death is more profound than death in the bullring.

The only cure for a headache is a hangover.

Time is fixed and time is flexible. It is an invention by man and the curse of man. We all need more time.

Don't let baby slip too quickly from your fingers. Hang on tight until she's ready to go. And then hang on a little longer.

The only thing the English have left is their past.

A teacher can't teach you how to write. What a teacher can do is show a writer how not to write.

Love is a word the English don't use except when they talk about their horses and dogs.

To use a sculptural metaphor, the great novel, essay, biography is imprisoned inside a block of marble and the writer must chip away with a tiny chisel until the exquisite appears

How you live your life is a question of choices. You must do your best to make the right ones and make sure you fix it when you don't.

A skeleton key opens many locks.

It is a curse not speaking languages and in a broken world more important than ever before.

Sorry is what the English say when they don't know what to say.