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...

It’s all right. I’m not upset. After all, they were just things. When you’ve lost your mother and your father, you can’t care so much about things, can you?

All children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma.

A man who aspires to rise above the mediocre, to be something more than the ordinary, surely deserves admiration, even if he fails and loses a fortune on account of his ambitions(…)if one has failed...

But you play that passage like it’s the -memory- of love. You’re so young, yet you know desertion, abandonment. That’s why you play that third movement the way you do. Most cellists, they play it...

I do feel part of that generation of people who were rather idealistic in the ’70s and became disillusioned in the ’80s. Not just about social services issues, but the world.

I can see,’ Miss Emily said, ‘that it might look as though you were simply pawns in a game. It can certainly be looked at like that. But think of it. You were lucky pawns....

Unless you have a real sense of precious things under threat, there would be nothing sad about time being limited.

Maybe all of us at Hailsam had little secrets like that — little private nooks created out of thin air where we could go off alone without fears and longing.

The stranger thought it might be God himself had forgotten much from our pasts, events far distant, events of the same day. And if a thing is not in God’s mind, then what chance of...

Wenn ich den Eindruck hätte, dass in dem, was Sie da sagen, auch nur ein Körnchen Vernunft steckt, würde ich mir vielleicht die Mühe machen, mich auf eine solche Diskussion einzulassen. Aber wie die Dinge...

It is a protected world. To some extent at least you have to shield children from what you know and drip-feed information to them. Sometimes that is kindly meant, and sometimes not.

I think genre rules should be porous, if not nonexistent.

When we lost something precious, and we’d looked and looked and still couldn’t find it, then we didn’t have to be completely heartbroken. We still had that last bit of comfort, thinking one day, when...

I think I had actually served my apprenticeship as a writer of fiction by writing all those songs. I had already been through phases of autobiographical or experimental stuff.

You say you’re sure? Sure that you’re in love? How can you know it? You think love is so simple?

People are not two-thirds one thing and the remainder something else. Temperament, personality, or outlook don’t divide quite like that. The bits don’t separate clearly. You end up a funny homogeneous mixture. This is something...

I felt slightly superior to student politics, for instance. I had no reason to think this, but I thought of myself as slightly more seasoned. I became quite cynical talking to my student friends.

When it was too late for rescue, it was still early enough for revenge.

As I’ve said, it wasn’t until a long time afterwards—long after I’d left the Cottages—that I realized just how significant out little encounter in the churchyard had been. I was upset at the time, yes....

Yes, we’re doing this now and I’m glad we’re doing it now. But what apity we left it so late.

Nagasaki is not just a few hazy images. I remember it as a real chunk of my life.

I suppose it had something to do with it being a secret, just how much it had meant to me. Maybe all of us at Hailsham had little secrets like that–little private nooks created out...

I used to think when I was in my teens I was very different from my father, but now I see that what we do is probably quite similar.

If you look at my last songs and first short stories, there is a real connection between them.

That was the only time, as I stood there, looking at that strange rubbish, feeling the wind coming across those empty fields, that I started to imagine just a little fantasy thing, because this was...

You see, because [Norfolk is] stuck out here on the east, on this hump jutting into the sea, it’s not on the way to anywhere. People going north and south, they bypass it altogether. For...

The idea of a successful novel was something that was reviewed in the Observer and then sank without trace. Literature wasn’t a happening thing in those days. Music and fringe theatre and television playwriting were...

An artist’s concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.

And what made these heart-to-hearts possible–you might even say what made the whole friendship possible during that time–was this understanding we had that anything we told each other during these moments would be treated with...

Democracy is a fine thing. But that doesn’t mean citizens have a right to run riot whenever they disagree with something.#Page: 120

There’s a practical problem about time and energy, and a more subtle problem of what it does to a writer’s head, to continually analyze why they write, where it all comes from, where it’s going...

Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.

It is only when you have discovered the other person’s status that you know how to address and treat them.

I went through my purple-prose phase in my songwriting… I was really writing between the lines. And that was what I took into my fiction. That was my apprenticeship, really.

I half closed my eyes and imagined this was the spot where everything I’d ever lost since my childhood had washed up, and I was now standing here in front of it, and if I...

What is more, sir,” his lordship went on, “I believe I have a good idea of what you mean by ‘professionalism.’ It appears to mean getting one’s way by cheating and manipulating. It appears to...

I work very regular hours, roughly 9 to 5:30. I think I have it much easier than a lot of parents. I just sit at home.

For a great many people, the evening is the most enjoyable part of the day. Perhaps, then, there is something to his advice that I should cease looking back so much, that I should adopt...

Perhaps one day, all these conflicts will end, and it won’t be because of great statesmen or churches or organisations like this one. It’ll be because people have changed. They’ll be like you, Puffin. More...

Its was one of those events which at a crucial stage in one’s development arrive to challenge and stretch one to the limit of one’s ability and beyond, so that thereafter one has a new...