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" How often one reads a contemporary full-length novel and thinks quietly, mutinously, that it would have worked out better at half or a third the length. "

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" The best way to tell people about climate change is through non-fiction. There's a vast literature of outstanding writing on the subject. "

" True intelligence requires fabulous imagination. "

" I put it to you that there are no British poets, there are no British novelists. I have heard myself described as one, but I think really I'm an English novelist; there are Scottish poets and Scottish novelists. "

" I don't believe there's any inherent darkness at the center of religion at all. I think religion actually is a morally neutral force. "

" Politics is the enemy of the imagination. "

" As regards literary culture, it fascinates me that it has been so resilient to the Union. For example, when T.S. Eliot wanted to become poet in these lands, it wasn't as an English poet, it was an Anglian poet he wanted to be. "

" London in the '70s was a pretty catastrophic dump, I can tell you. We had every kind of industrial trouble; we had severe energy problems; we were under constant terrorist attack from Irish terrorist groups who started a bombing campaign in English cities; politics were fantastically polarized between left and right. "

" I want to live in a place where strangers rush to help someone in distress. "

" My parents were keen for me to have the education they themselves never had. They weren't able to guide me towards particular books, but they encouraged me to read, which I did, randomly and compulsively. "

" It's good to get your hands dirty a bit and to test how you see things at a given point. And it's very pleasing after writing something like 'Atonement' or 'On Chesil Beach,' which are historical, to get involved in some plausible re-enactment of the here and now. "

" Novelists have to be adept at controlling the flow of information, and, most crucially, they have to be in charge of the narrative. "

" Not being boring is quite a challenge. "

" Something is missing in our culture. We can't quite celebrate the scientific literary tradition. "

" Atheists have as much conscience, possibly more, than people with deep religious conviction, and they still have the same problem of how they reconcile themselves to a bad deed in the past. It's a little easier if you've got a god to forgive you. "

" It should simply be an empirical matter whether the climate is changing or not and whether we're responsible. But the various sides of the debate have now become so tribal that it's no longer a matter of changing our views as more information comes in. "

" Some people are tied to five hundred words a day, six days a week. I'm a hesitater. "

" I'm quite good at not writing. "

" What I've discovered and really confirmed to myself is that opera really likes loud colours, and you need something bold, something savage, unpredictable, passionate. You can't really run a two-hour opera round some muted murmuring. "

" I don't really believe in evil at all. "

" Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist. "

" In my experience an appreciative letter from a fellow writer means a lot. "

" A twenty-one-year-old writer is likely to be inhibited by a lack of usable experience. Childhood and adolescence were something I knew. "

" When I began I thought that literature was contained within a bubble that somehow floated above the world commented upon by newspapers. But I became more and more interested in trying to include some of that world within my work. "

" I don't hold grudges. "

" The moment you have children and a mortgage you want things to work; you're locked into the human project and you want it to flourish. "

" By concentrating on what is good in people, by appealing to their idealism and their sense of justice, and by asking them to put their faith in the future, socialists put themselves at a severe disadvantage. "

" You could say that all novels are spy novels and all novelists are spy masters. "

" At the risk of sounding like Virginia Woolf, I could live on £700 a year. "

" You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other. "

" I think of novels in architectural terms. You have to enter at the gate, and this gate must be constructed in such a way that the reader has immediate confidence in the strength of the building. "