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...

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.