Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Every country should have a strong literary tradition of its own at the center, but it should also have an interest in other countries.
Love isn't about when you first meet. It's about the many, many years you spend together, when you're trying to keep that flame burning.
There is certainly a satisfaction and dignity to be gained in coming to terms with the mistakes one has made in the course of one’s life
What interests me is the surprising enormous extent to which most people accept the fate that's been given to them, and find some dignity.
I think it's quite difficult to understand what kind of life a writer leads. They might be millionaires, or they might be starving people.
When I was younger, I didn't read that much. I was more interested in film and music. Now I'm curious. I want to know what it's all about.
Many of our deepest motives come, not from an adult logic of how things work in the world, but out of something that is frozen from childhood.
After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?
Sometimes I get so immersed in my own company, if I unexpectedly run into someone I know, it's a bit of a shock and takes me a while to adjust.
If you go to Tokyo, I think it becomes very obvious that there's this almost seamless mixture of popular culture and Japanese traditional culture.
And if these incidents now seem full of significance and all of a piece, it's probably because I'm looking at them in the light of what came later.
I have the feeling of this completely alternative person I should have become. There was another life that I might have had, but I’m having this one.
I don't think it's any fun, even if you are one of the most respected authors in the world like Margaret Atwood, to keep being nominated and not win.
What I wished more than anything was that the thing hadn't happened at all, and I thought that by not mentioning it I'd be doing everyone else a favor.
Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.
I'm very fortunate in that I don't have money problems. I have lunch with my wife at home. I don't have to commute, so I have much more time with my family.
To some extent, at least, you have to shield children from what you know and drip-feed information to them. Sometimes that is kindly meant, and sometimes not.
But then, I suppose, when with the benefit of hindsight one begins to search one's past for such 'turning points', one is apt to start seeing them everywhere.
Maybe all of us at Hailsam had little secrets like that -- little private nooks created out of thin air where we could go off alone without fears and longing.
I really have to think of the things fiction can do that film can't and play to the strengths of the novel. With a novel you can get right inside somebody's head.
We always like to keep our children in a kind of bubble and censor the bad news about the world. We like to tell them the world is full of benevolent, nice people.
There's something very misleading about the literary culture that looks at writers in their 30s and calls them 'budding' or 'promising', when in fact they're peaking.
What is pertinent is the calmness of beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as though the land knows of its own beauty, its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it.
It didn't hurt, did it? When I hit you?" "Sure. Fractured skull. Concussion, the lot..." "But seriously, Kath. No hard feelings, right? I'm awfully sorry. I honestly am.
My friends and I took songwriting very, very seriously. My hero was and still is Bob Dylan, but also people like Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell and that whole generation.
When you become a parent, or a teacher, you turn into a manager of this whole system. You become the person controlling the bubble of innocence around a child, regulating it.
This is the big question that we all have about our children: How much, how soon, do we tell our children the less comfortable facts about the world they're going to inherit?
I do feel part of that generation of people who were rather idealistic in the '70s and became disillusioned in the '80s. Not just about social services issues, but the world.
I think I had actually served my apprenticeship as a writer of fiction by writing all those songs. I had already been through phases of autobiographical or experimental stuff.
It is one of the enjoyments of retirement that you are able to drift through the day at your own pace, easy in the knowledge that you have put hard work and achievement behind you.
I was a little concerned that a lot of people thought I wrote Merchant Ivory movies. I also thought if I was ever going to write something strange and difficult, that was the time.
Our family arrived in England in 1960. At that time I thought the war was ancient history. But if I think of 15 years ago from now, thats 1990, and that seems like yesterday to me.
Our family arrived in England in 1960. At that time I thought the war was ancient history. But if I think of 15 years ago from now, that's 1990, and that seems like yesterday to me.
I grew up in Britain before it became a multicultural place, so in many ways I have a nostalgia for an England that's vanished - the England of my childhood has actually disappeared.
The problem, as I see it, is that you've been told and not told. You've been told, but none of you really understand, and I dare say, some people are quite happy to leave it that way.
I try to always go for something... very interior, following thoughts and memories, something that I think is difficult to do on the screen, which is essentially a third-person medium.
Screenplays I didn't really care about, journalism, travel books, getting my writer friends to write about their dreams or something. I just determined to write the books I had to write.
Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory. I like the atmospheres that result if episodes are narrated through the haze of memory.
I don't hang out with the glitteringly successful people; I hang out with people who've been friends for many years, and to some extent I feel my worldly success is a bit uncomfortable for them.
I felt slightly superior to student politics, for instance. I had no reason to think this, but I thought of myself as slightly more seasoned. I became quite cynical talking to my student friends.
There's a practical problem about time and energy, and a more subtle problem of what it does to a writer's head, to continually analyze why they write, where it all comes from, where it's going to.
The book was at a reasonably high position on the New York Times... before I was in the country. I thought it would be an interesting experiment to see if my presence here would push it up or down.
It was like being given a maths problem when your brain's exhausted, and you know there's some far-off solution, but you can't work up the energy even to give it a go. Something in me just gave up.
I find Japanese books quite baffling when I read them in translation. It's only with Haruki Murakami that I find Japanse fiction that I can understand and relate to. He's a very international writer.
What is difficult is the promotion, balancing the public side of a writer's life with the writing. I think that's something a lot of writers are having to face. Writers have become much more public now.
You have to accept that sometimes that's how things happen in this world. People's opinions, their feelings, they go one way, then the other. It just so happens you grew up at a certain point in this process.
I think there is a huge difference between writers who have very big sales, and writers who have small sales. Even writers with very high reputations, even Nobel prize winners, often sell in very low figures.
What I'm not sure about, is if our lives have been so different from the lives of the people we save. We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we've lived through, or feel we've had enough time.
I had the sense when I looked back over my life I would actually see a mess of decisions, a few of which I had thought about, some of which I had sort of stumbled on and many that I had no control over whatsoever.
I'm not at all interested in the brave who fight against the odds and win. I am interested in those who accept their lot, as that is what many people in the world are doing. They do their best in ghastly conditions.