Finally he spoke the three simple words that no amount of bad art or bad faith can every quite cheapen. She repeated them, with exactly the same slight emphasis on the second word, as though...

Dearest Cecilia, You’d be forgiven for thinking me mad, the way I acted this afternoon. The truth is I feel rather light headed and foolish in your presence, Cee, and I don’t think I can...

Becoming drunk is a journey that generally elates him in the early stages—he’s good company, expansive, mischievous and fun, the famous old poet, almost as happy listening as talking. But once the destination is met,...

Wasn’t writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?

He wanted a father, and for the same reason, he wanted to be a father.

was it possible that i was, in the modern term, in denial?

This was when he first suspected that the kindly child-loving God extolled by his headmistress might not exist. As it turned out, most major world events suggested the same. But for Theo’s sincerely godless generation,...

It was always the view of my parents,” Emily said, “that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people.

The light of artistic creation is also blinding.The artist can’t see the suffering he causesto those around him. And the’ll neverunderstand the purity of his goal, how the heatof his invention won’t melt the ice...

This is how the entire course of a life can be changed: by doing nothing.

Either I’ve always spoken to her from the heart in times like this, or I never have and I don’t know what it means.

All day we’ve witnessed each other’s crimes. You killed no one today? But how many did you leave to die?

A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader’s. It was a magical process, so...

You can tell a lot from a person’s nails. When a life starts to unravel, they’re among the first to go.

It is photography itself that creates the illusion of innocence. Its ironies of frozen narrative lend to its subjects an apparent unawareness that they will change or die. It is the future they are innocent...

This is what he disliked about political people – injustice and calamity animated them, it was their milk, their lifeblood, it pleasured them.

But when I was an energetic self-important 10-year-old and found myself in a roomful of grownups, I felt guilty, and thought it only polite to conceal the fun I was having elsewhere. When an aged...

Every secret of the body was rendered up–bone risen through flesh, sacrilegious glimpses of an intestine or an optic nerve. From this new and intimate perspective, [Briony] learned a simple, obvious thing she had always...

The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.

That evening he plays with the children, cleans the hamster’s cage with them, gets them into their pyjamas, and reads to them three times over, once together, then to Jake on his own, then to...

He came to find her, wanting what everyone wanted, and what only free-thinking people, not the supernatural, could give. Meaning.

At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.

In a language as idiomatically stressed as English, opportunities for misreadings are bound to arise. By a mere backward movement of stress, a verb can become a noun, an act a thing. To refuse, to...

Quantum mechanics. What a repository, a dump, of human aspiration it was, the borderland where mathematical rigor defeated common sense, and reason and fantasy irrationally merged. Here the mystically inclined could find whatever they required...

The luxury of being half-asleep, exploring the fringes of psychosis in safety.

Perhaps I’d been a slow developer, but I was well into my forties before I realized that you don’t have to comply with a request just because it’s reasonable or reasonably put. Age is the...

Virtue is too passive, too narrow. Virtue can motivate individuals, but for groups, societies, a whole civilisation, it’s a weak force. Nations are never virtuous, though they might sometimes think they are.

And though you think the world is at your feet, it can rise up and tread on you.

That the world should be filled with such detail, such tiny points of human frailty, threatened to crush her and she had to look away.

Only when you are grown up, perhaps only when you have children yourself, do you fully understand that your own parents had a full and intricate existence before you were born.

But this first clumsy attempt showed her that the imagination itself was a source of secrets: once she had begun a story, no one could be told. Pretending in words was too tentative, too vulnerable,...

I was irritated by the way he conflated his own shifting needs with an impersonal destiny. I want it, therefore…it’s in the stars!

J’aurais dû traverser l’existence avec ce privilège que donne la beauté, de pouvoir prendre les hommes et les jeter. Au lieu de quoi c’étaient eux qui m’abandonnaient ou mouraient. Ou bien se mariaient.

My pleasure in reading is not necessarily the witnessing of something new, but of something familiar which I haven’t seen described.

Where the human need for order meetsthe human tendency to mayhem, where civilization runs smack against its discontents, you find friction, and a great deal of general wear and tear.

It’s the essence of a degenerating mind periodically, to lose all sense of continuous self, and therefore any regard for what others think of your lack of continuity.

He knew these last lines by heart and mouthed them now in the darkness. My reason for life. Not living, but life. That was the touch. And she was his reason for life, and why...

…children are at heart selfish, and reasonably so, for they are programmed for survival.

But this inglorious revolution wasn’t for me. I didn’t want a sex shop in every town.

No one knows anything, really. It’s all rented, or borrowed.

The library door was thick and none of the ordinary sounds that might have reminded them, might have held them back, could reach them. They were beyond the present, outside time, with no memories and...

Now and then, an inch below the water’s surface, the muscles of his stomach tightened involuntarily as he recalled another detail. A drop of water on her upper arm. Wet. An embroidered flower, a simple...

…the unimaginable age of the mountains and the fine mesh of living things that lay across them would remind him that he was part of this order and insignificant within it, and he would be...

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, that she was needed.

You pull a book from the shelf and there was an invention… Almost like cooking, I thought sleepily. Instead of heat transforming the ingredients, there’s pure invention, the spark, the hidden element. What resulted was...

We go on our hands and knees and crawl our way towards the truth

I’ve never outgrown that feeling of mild pride, of acceptance, when children take your hand.

The constrained lives of his characters made me wonder how my own existence might appear in his hands.