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

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

" What is it precisely, that feeling of 'returning' from a poem? Something is lighter, softer, larger - then it fades, but never completely. "

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

" You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan. "

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

" One important theme is the extent to which one can ever correct an error, especially outside any frame of religious forgiveness. All of us have done something we regret - how we manage to remove that from our conscience, or whether that's even possible, interested me. "

" Not being boring is quite a challenge. "

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

" 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. "

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

" I actually find novels that are determined to be funny at every turn quite oppressive. "

" 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 was an intimate sort of child who never spoke up in groups. I preferred close friends. "

" Oh, I've become immune to the Booker. I think we need something a little more like the Pulitzer prize, where there isn't this great race. "

" My father's drinking was sometimes a problem. And a great deal went unspoken. He was not particularly acute or articulate about the emotions. But he was very affectionate towards me. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I wouldn't mind being the lead guitarist in an incredibly successful rock band. However, I don't play the guitar. "

" 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. "

" I often don't read reviews. "

" 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. "

" I always used to deny this, but I guess what I'm really saying is that I was writing to shock... And I dug deep and dredged up all kinds of vile things which fascinated me at the time. "

" I don't hold grudges. "

" I'm quite good at not writing. "

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

" One has to have the courage of one's pessimism. "

" 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. "

" We overvalue the arts in relation to the sciences. "

" Politics is the enemy of the imagination. "