The best way to tell people about climate change is through non-fiction. There’s a vast literature of outstanding writing on the subject.
Finally, you had to measure yourself by other people – there really was nothing else. every now and then, quite unintentionally, someone taught you something about yourself.
This is how the entire course of a life can be changed: by doing nothing.
She returned his gaze, struck by the sense of her own transformation, and overwhelmed by the beauty which a lifetime havit had taught her to ignore.
How can a novelist achieve atonement when with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also god?
How easily this unthinking family love was forgotten.
Arguing with a dead man in a lavatory is a claustrophobic experience.
Most of humanity gets by without reading novels or poetry, and no one would deny the richness of their thoughts.
Not being boring is quite a challenge.
But what really happened? The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish.
Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destory?
This is the pain-pleasure of having newly adult children; they’re innocent and ruthless in forgetting their sweet old dependence.
I want to live in a place where strangers rush to help someone in distress.
When people ask, “Is there any advice you’d give a young writer?,” I say write short stories. They afford lots of failure. Pastiche is a great way to start.
I’ve always thought cruelty is a failure of imagination.
Dying in unfamiliar surroundings miles away from home, it cannot possibly be good. There is a great sadness about that I think.
When people have supernatural beliefs I think they should be respected but there is no reason why they need to impose them on others.
How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all.
There are these rare moments when musicians together touch something sweeter than they’ve ever found before in rehearsals or performance, beyond the merely collaborative or technically proficient, when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as friendship or love. This is when they give us a glimpse of what we might be, of our best selves, and of an impossible world in which you give everything to others, but lose nothing of yourself.
For children, childhood is timeless. It is always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course, they have memories. Of course, time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes round in the end. But they don’t feel it. Today is what they feel, and when they say ‘When I grow up,’ there is always an edge of disbelief – how could they ever be other than what they are?