“A twenty-one-year-old writer is likely to be inhibited by a lack of usable experience. Childhood and adolescence were something I knew.”

“Atheists have as much conscience, possibly more, than people with deep religious conviction, and they still have the same problem of how they reconcile themselves to a bad deed in the past. It's a little easier if you've got a god to forgive you.”

“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 future, socialists put themselves at a severe disadvantage.”

“I always used to deny this, but I guess what I'm really saying is that I was writing to shock... And I dug deep and dredged up all kinds of vile things which fascinated me at the time.”

“I don't believe there's any inherent darkness at the center of religion at all. I think religion actually is a morally neutral force.”

“I don't hold grudges.”

“I think of novels in architectural terms. You have to enter at the gate, and this gate must be constructed in such a way that the reader has immediate confidence in the strength of the building.”

“I was an intimate sort of child who never spoke up in groups. I preferred close friends.”

“I wouldn't mind being the lead guitarist in an incredibly successful rock band. However, I don't play the guitar.”

“In my experience an appreciative letter from a fellow writer means a lot.”

“It is not the first duty of the novelist to provide blueprints for insurrection, or uplifting tales of successful resistance for the benefit of the opposition. The naming of what is there is what is important.”

“It should simply be an empirical matter whether the climate is changing or not and whether we're responsible. But the various sides of the debate have now become so tribal that it's no longer a matter of changing our views as more information comes in.”

“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 'Atonement' or 'On Chesil Beach,' which are historical, to get involved in some plausible re-enactment of the here and now.”

“My father's drinking was sometimes a problem. And a great deal went unspoken. He was not particularly acute or articulate about the emotions. But he was very affectionate towards me.”

“Not being boring is quite a challenge.”

“Now, I'm an atheist. I really don't believe for a moment that our moral sense comes from a god.”

“One has to have the courage of one's pessimism.”

“One important theme is the extent to which one can ever correct an error, especially outside any frame of religious forgiveness. All of us have done something we regret - how we manage to remove that from our conscience, or whether that's even possible, interested me.”

“Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist.”

“Reading reviews makes you thin-skinned. It's like waves washing layers off your skin.”

“The end of secrecy would be the end of the novel - especially the English novel. The English novel requires social secrecy, personal secrecy.”

“True intelligence requires fabulous imagination.”

“What is it precisely, that feeling of 'returning' from a poem? Something is lighter, softer, larger - then it fades, but never completely.”

“What I've discovered and really confirmed to myself is that opera really likes loud colours, and you need something bold, something savage, unpredictable, passionate. You can't really run a two-hour opera round some muted murmuring.”

“What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike?”

“You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.”