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.
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.
All my life I have lied. I lied to escape, I lied to be loved, I lied for placement and power; I lied to lie. It was a way of living; lies are life’s almost-anagram.
Art is amoral, whether we accept this or not; it does not take sides. The finest fictions are cold at heart.
There are times, they occur with increasing frequency nowadays, when I seem to know nothing, when everything I know seems to have fallen out of my mind like a shower of rain, and I am gripped for a moment in paralysed dismay, waiting for it all to come back but with no certainty that it will.
We artists love to talk tough, but we’re just as sentimental as everyone else when it comes down to it.