Occupation: Novelist Birth: June 21, 1948
And she did not miss his presence so much as his voice on the phone. Even being lied to constantly, though hardly like love, was sustained attention;….
We know so little about each other. We lie mostly submerged, like ice floes, with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white..
He would work through the night and sleep until lunch. There wasn't really much else to do. Make something, and die..
That love which does not build a foundation on good sense is doomed..
How easily this unthinking family love was forgotten..
Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist..
There are ways in which art can have a longer reach than politics..
If I could write the perfect novella I would die happy..
How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God?.
At the risk of sounding like Virginia Woolf, I could live on £700 a year..
It wasn't torpor that kept her - she was often restless to the point of irritability. She simply liked to feel that she was prevented from leaving, t….
Screenwriting is an opportunity to fly first class, be treated like a celebrity, sit around the pool and be betrayed..
She wanted to leave, she wanted to lie alone face down on her bed and savor the vile piquancy of the moment, and go back down the lines of branching ….
I like to think that each book I start is a completely new departure But I’ve learned that whatever you do, readers will have no difficulty assimilat….
Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?.
Dying in unfamiliar surroundings miles away from home, it cannot possibly be good. There is a great sadness about that I think..
It's good to get your hands dirty a bit and to test how you see things at a given point. And it's very pleasing after writing something like 'Atoneme….
No one knew about the squirrel’s skull beneath Briony bed, but no one wanted to know..
He was looking at her with amused suspicion. There was something between them, and even she had to acknowledge that a tame remark about the weather s….
What I've discovered and really confirmed to myself is that opera really likes loud colours, and you need something bold, something savage, unpredict….
By concentrating on what is good in people, by appealing to their idealism and their sense of justice, and by asking them to put their faith in the f….