Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I am the worst judge of my books.
I'm a hopeless 19th-century romantic.
Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
The past beats inside me like a second heart.
The novel is resilient, and so are novelists.
I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
A plot begins when somebody has something to hide.
No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
You can't write about fantasy without being ridiculous.
The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
The white May blossom swooned slowly into the open mouth of the grave.
Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
With crime fiction, you have to write a half-dozen before they catch on.
If they give me the bloody prize, why can't they say nice things about me?
We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.
What is money, after all? Almost nothing, when one has a sufficiency of it.
Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it.
I don't make a distinction between men and women. To me they are just people.
I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.
I like ideas. I find them more exciting than human behavior for the most part.
In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
The world is not real for me until it has been pushed through the mesh of language.
Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.
...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
We writers are shy, nocturnal creatures. Push us into the light and the light blinds us.
That's one of the many things I hate about life, that it's a hideously cliched business.
A man is not much if he can't depend on himself, and nothing if others can't depend on him.
To take possession of a city of which you are not a native you must first fall in love there.
All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.
If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.
The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.
I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.
I would be far more critical than any reviewer could be of my own work. So I simply don't read them.
I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.
It's great people still care about books, and it's great you can still fashion a life from literature.
We artists love to talk tough, but we're just as sentimental as everyone else when it comes down to it.
We're constantly losing - we're losing time, we're losing ourselves. I don't feel for the things I lost.
Art is amoral, whether we accept this or not; it does not take sides. The finest fictions are cold at heart.
When fans of mine meet me, I can see the disappointment in their eyes. Every artist knows of this phenomenon.
How flat all sounds are at the seaside, flat and yet emphatic, like the sound of gunshots heard at a distance.
In my books you have to concentrate, but I work hard to make it that, when you do, the rewards are quite high.
And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.
Ian McEwan is a very good writer; the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters.
Doing what you do well is death. Your duty is to keep trying to do things that you don't do well, in the hope of learning.
The trouble with you, Vic," he said, "is that you think of the world as a sort of huge museum with too many visitors allowed in.
With the crime novels, its delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. Its like having a fictitious family.