She might be a great person, but life’s so much bigger than just loving someone.
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.
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.
When I see films made from books, I make a huge effort not to remember the book. It’s important to see the film as a film.
I want my words to survive translation. I know when I write a book now I will have to go and spend three days being intensely interrogated by journalists in Denmark or wherever. That fact, I believe, informs the way I write – with those Danish journalists leaning over my shoulder.
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.
I had been plunged into a different world. I found myself spending half my time answering weird questions on book tours in the Midwest. People would stand up and explain to me the situation in their office and ask me whether they should resign or not.
There are things I am more interested in than the clone thing. How are they trying to find their place in the world and make sense of their lives? To what extent can they transcend their fate? As time starts to run out, what are the things that really matter?
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.
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.
It had never occurred to me that our lives, which had been so closely interwoven, could unravel with such speed.
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.
There comes a point when you can more or less count the number of books you’re going to write before you die.
There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.
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...
You need to remember that. If you’re to have decent lives, you have to know who you are and what lies ahead of you, every one of you.
Your life must now run the course that’s been set for it.
If you were a boy and a girl and you were in love with each other, really, properly in love, and if you could show it, then the people who run Hailsham, they sorted it out for you. They sorted it out so you could have a few years together before you began your donations.
I started as a songwriter and wanted to be like Leonard Cohen. I’ve always seen my stories as enlarged songs.
I think jogging is bad for your health. All that pressure on the knees and back cannot be good for you.