Especially difficult when the first and best unconscious move of a dedicated liar is to persuade himself he's sincere. And once he's sincere, all deception vanishes.

I do have a very strong sense that most of the terrible things in life happen suddenly and unpredictably, and certainly can sweep you off in different directions, and that is always of interest to a novelist.

For the professors in the academy, for the humanities generally, misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack.

I’ll wait for you. Come back. The words were not meaningless, but they didn’t touch him now. It was clear enough - one person waiting for another was like an arithmetical sum, and just as empty of emotion. Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached. Waiting was a heavy word.

No one knew about the squirrel’s skull beneath Briony bed, but no one wanted to know.

We know so little about each other. We lie mostly submerged, like ice floes, with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white.

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