His anger stirred her own and she suddenly thought she understood their problem: they were too polite, too constrained, too timorous, they went around each other on tiptoes, murmuring, whispering, def...
Henry liked to put to himself when he was a schoolboy: what are the chances of this particular fish, from that shoal, off that continental shelf ending up in the pages of this copy of the Daily Mirror...
Everything that impeded him had to be outweighed, even if only by a fraction, by all that drove him on.
Especially difficult when the first and best unconscious move of a dedicated liar is to persuade himself he's sincere. And once he's sincere, all deception vanishes.
Daylight seemed then to be the physical manifestation of common sense.
Could it ever be explained, how matter becomes conscious?
Briony began to understand the chasm that lay between an idea and its execution
Being late was a special kind of modern suffering, with blended elements of rising tension, self-blame, self-pity, misanthropy, and a yearning for what could not be had outside theoretical physics: ti...
As far as the welfare of every other living form on earth was concerned, the human project was not just a failure, it was a mistake from the very beginning.
Arguing with a dead man in a lavatory is a claustrophobic experience.
And now she was back in the world, not one she could make, but the one that had made her, and she felt herself shrinking under the early evening sky. She was weary of being outdoors, but she was not r...
And feeling clever, I've always thought, is just a sigh away from being cheerful.
In the seventies I used to work in the bedroom of my flat at a little table. I worked in longhand with a fountain pen. I'd type out a draft, mark up the typescript, type it out again. Once I paid a pr...
He came to find her, wanting what everyone wanted, and what only free-thinking people, not the supernatural, could give. Meaning.
I don't believe there's any inherent darkness at the center of religion at all. I think religion actually is a morally neutral force.
I actually find novels that are determined to be funny at every turn quite oppressive.
A twenty-one-year-old writer is likely to be inhibited by a lack of usable experience. Childhood and adolescence were something I knew.
In my experience an appreciative letter from a fellow writer means a lot.
Writers are said to have superstitions and little rituals. Readers have them too.
Was it boredom or sadism that made the shirt service people do up every single button?