Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
She always wanted to believe in things.
I want my words to survive translation.
So why not become a mongrel? It's healthy
Your life must now run the course that's been set for it.
I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.
My donors have always tended to do much better than expected.
An artist's concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.
Don’t you wonder sometimes, what might have happened if you tried?
Poor creatures. What did we do to you? With all our schemes and plans?
There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.
All children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma.
What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint.
To see the best before I have properly begun would be somewhat premature.
Indeed — why should I not admit it? — in that moment, my heart was breaking.
People were incredibly kind to our family and went out of their way to help.
She might be a great person, but life's so much bigger than just loving someone.
The world is crawling with authors touring now. They're like performance artists.
I spent ages figuring out things like viewpoint, how you tell the story, and so on.
Now naturally, like many of us, I have a reluctance to change too much of the old ways.
One is not struck by the truth until prompted quite accidentally by some external event.
And I'm a Hailsham student - which is enough by itself sometimes to get people's backs up.
It was like there was some parallel universe we all vanished off to where we had all this sex.
If you look at my last songs and first short stories, there is a real connection between them.
You say you’re sure? Sure that you’re in love? How can you know it? You think love is so simple?
Now when I look back to the Guildford of that time it seems far more exotic to me than Nagasaki.
I discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me.
Now when I look back to the Guildford of that time, it seems far more exotic to me than Nagasaki.
I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they'd once belonged to the sea.
I cannot start a story or chapter without knowing how it ends. ... Of course, it rarely ends that way.
Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory.
I think jogging is bad for your health. All that pressure on the knees and back cannot be good for you.
I can't even say I made my own mistakes. Really - one has to ask oneself - what dignity is there in that?
I've always had a great fondness for English detective fiction such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.
As with a wound on one's own body, it is possible to develop an intimacy with the most disturbing of things
As a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.
I started as a songwriter and wanted to be like Leonard Cohen. I've always seen my stories as enlarged songs.
There comes a point when you can more or less count the number of books you're going to write before you die.
The evening's the best part of the day. You've done your day's work. Now you can put your feet up and enjoy it.
It had never occurred to me that our lives, which had been so closely interwoven, could unravel with such speed.
Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers.
I wouldn't want to try to adapt something of my own. It would be like going back to school and doing all my exams again.
When I see films made from books, I make a huge effort not to remember the book. It's important to see the film as a film.
One need hardly dwell on the catastrophic possibility of uttering a bantering remark only to discover it wholly inappropriate
When a man induces his wife to turn suspicious thoughts against her own father, then that is surely cause enough for resentment.
If you are under the impression you have already perfected yourself, you will never rise to the heights you are no doubt capable of.
There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.
You need to remember that. If you’re to have decent lives, you have to know who you are and what lies ahead of you, every one of you.
I don't have a deep link with England like, say, Jonathan Coe or Hanif Kureishi might demonstrate. For me it is like a mythical place.
I don't have a deep link with England like, say, Jonathan Coe or Hanif Kureishi might demonstrate. For me, it is like a mythical place.
We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all.