Poor creatures. What did we do to you? With all our schemes and plans?

One day, maybe not so long from now, you’ll get to know how it feels.” So you’re waiting, even if you don’t quite know it, waiting for the moment when you realise that you really...

Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory.

When my own time comes, will I too long for the sea? I think I will be content enough with the soil. And I will not demand the exact spot, but let it be within...

I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they’d once belonged to the sea.

I do not think I responded immediately, for it took me a moment or two to fully digest these words of Miss Kenton. Moreover, as you might appreciate, their implications were such as to provoke...

When I got to 40 or so… I had the sense when I looked back over my life I would actually see a mess of decisions, a few of which I had thought about, some...

In any case, while it is all very well to talk of ‘turning points’, one can surely only recognise such moments in retrospect. Naturally, when one looks back to such instances today, they may indeed...

I still have a suspicion of charity and think the state has a role to play in many areas. And although for most of the years since I have been a rather privileged writer, I...

I think the judging process is full of integrity, compared to some other prizes around the world. The fact that they change the panel of judges every year keeps it from becoming corrupt. I think...

But what is the sense in forever speculating what might have happened had such and such a moment turned out differently? One could presumably drive oneself to distraction in this way. In any case, while...

You need to remember that. If you’re to have decent lives, you have to know who you are and what lies ahead of you, every one of you.

I felt I had almost written myself into a corner. You could say I’d rewritten the same novel three times and I thought I had to move on. The success of the book, and then...

If you are under the impression you have already perfected yourself, you will never rise to the heights you are no doubt capable of.

All I know is that I’ve wasted all these years looking for something, a sort of trophy I’d get only if I really, really did enough to deserve it. But I don’t want it anymore,...

Everything might scatter. You might be right. I suppose it’s something we can’t easily get away from. People need to feel they belong. To a nation, to a race. Otherwise, who knows what might happen?...

As a writer, I’m more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.

Naturally—and why should I not admit this—I have occasionally wondered to myself how things might have turned out in the long run…. I only speculate this now because in the light of subsequent events, it...

Screenplays I didn’t really care about, journalism, travel books, getting my writer friends to write about their dreams or something. I just determined to write the books I had to write.

The book was at a reasonably high position on the New York Times… before I was in the country. I thought it would be an interesting experiment to see if my presence here would push...

There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.

What do you think dignity’s all about?’The directness of the inquiry did, I admit, take me rather by surprise. ‘It’s rather a hard thing to explain in a few words, sir,’ I said. ‘But I...

When you are young, things like your moral stance and your political position seem very important. I’d spend long nights with my friends sorting out moral and political positions that we thought would take us...

How so much honourable is such a contest, in which one’s moral conduct and achievement are brought as witnesses rather than the size of one’s purse.#Page: 10

It was like there was some parallel universe we all vanished off to where we had all this sex.

I’m wondering if without our memories, there’s nothing for it but for our love to fade and die.

I was a little concerned that a lot of people thought I wrote Merchant Ivory movies. I also thought if I was ever going to write something strange and difficult, that was the time.

It was a fine feeling indeed to be standing up there like that, with the sound of summer all around one and a light breeze on one’s face. And I believe it was then, looking...

I couldn’t speak Japanese very well, passport regulations were changing, I felt British, and my future was in Britain. And it would also make me eligible for literary awards. But I still think I’m regarded...

I had been plunged into a different world. I found myself spending half my time answering weird questions on book tours in the Midwest. People would stand up and explain to me the situation in...

It had never occurred to me that our lives, which had been so closely interwoven, could unravel with such speed.

You see, we were able to give you something, something which even now no one will ever take from you, and we were able to do that principally by sheltering you. Hailsham would not have...

There are things I am more interested in than the clone thing. How are they trying to find their place in the world and make sense of their lives? To what extent can they transcend...

It might be just some trend that came and went,’ I said. ‘But for us, it’s our life.

I needed to get familiar with sex, and it would be just as well to practise first with a boy I didn’t care about too much. Then later on, if I was with someone special,...

This country awakens so many memories, though each seems like some restless sparrow I know will flee any moment into the breeze.

I want my words to survive translation. I know when I write a book now I will have to go and spend three days being intensely interrogated by journalists in Denmark or wherever. That fact,...

Perhaps there are those who are able to go about their lives unfettered by such concerns. But for those like us, our fate is to face the world as orphans, chasing through long years the...

While it is important to have principles, you have far less control of what happens. These principles and positions only get you so far, because what actually happens is that you don’t carefully chart your...

Now when I look back to the Guildford of that time, it seems far more exotic to me than Nagasaki.

One is not struck by the truth until prompted quite accidentally by some external event.

Sometimes I get so immersed in my own company, if I unexpectedly run into someone I know, it’s a bit of a shock and takes me a while to adjust.

When you become a parent, or a teacher, you turn into a manager of this whole system. You become the person controlling the bubble of innocence around a child, regulating it.

That’s most interesting. But I was no more a mind-reader then than today. Iwas weeping for an altogether different reason. When I watched you dancing that day, I saw something else. I saw a new...

Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers, and no doubt this applies to certain of the recollections I have gathered here. 

By mimicking the way memory works, a writer can actually write in a fluid way-one solid scene doesn’t have to fall on another solid scene, you can just have a fragment that then dovetails into...

As I say, I have never in all these years thought of the matter in quite this way; but then it is perhaps in the nature of coming away on a trip such as this...

The world is crawling with authors touring now. They’re like performance artists.

I often play little games in my head.

Nos-tal-gic,’ Akira said, as though it were a word he had been struggling to find. Then he said a word in Japanese, perhaps the Japanese for ‘nostalgic.’ ‘Nos-tal-gic. It is good to be nos-tal-gic. Very...