I shall strip away layer after layer of grime – the toffee-colored varnish and caked soot left by a lifetime of dissembling – until I come to the very thing itself and know it for what it is. My soul. My self.
When I finish a sentence, after much labor, it’s finished. A certain point comes at which you can’t do any more work on it because you know it will kill the sentence.
No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
I live in Dublin, God knows why. There are greatly more congenial places I could have settled in – Italy, France, Manhattan – but I like the climate here, and Irish light seems to be essential for me and for my writing.
I read Nietzsche when I was a teenager and then I went back to reading him when I was in my thirties, and his voice spoke directly to me. Nietzsche is such a superb literary artist.
The first thought that occurred to me, that night when I heard the chairman of the jury announce my name, was, Just think how many people hate me at this moment. Naturally, I wanted to annoy those people even further by being arrogant.
The white May blossom swooned slowly into the open mouth of the grave.
If they give me the bloody prize, why can’t they say nice things about me?
Ian McEwan is a very good writer; the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters.
Enormous morning, ponderous, meticulous; gray light streaking each bare branch, each single twig, along one side, making another tree, of glassy veins.
That’s one of the many things I hate about life, that it’s a hideously cliched business.
How flat all sounds are at the seaside, flat and yet emphatic, like the sound of gunshots heard at a distance.
What I was afraid of was my own grief, the weight of it, the ineluctable corrosive force of it, and the stark awareness I had of being, for the first time in my life, entirely alone, a Crusoe shipwrecked and stranded in the limitless wastes of a boundless and indifferent ocean.
I have this fantasy. I’m walking past a bookshop and I click my fingers and all my books go blank. So I can start again and get it right.
The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that’s the way it should be.
I’m full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.
I never went to university. I’m self-educated. I didn’t go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.
I don’t own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
I don’t make a distinction between men and women. To me they are just people.
I am the worst judge of my books.