When people ask, "Is there any advice you'd give a young writer?," I say write short stories. They afford lots of failure. Pastiche is a great way to start.

All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them.

Most of humanity gets by without reading novels or poetry, and no one would deny the richness of their thoughts.

Who you get, and how it works out - there's so much luck involved, as well as the million branching consequences of your conscious choice of a mate, that no one and no amount of talking can untangle it if it turns out unhappily.

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

I couldn't think about novels at all. It seemed the only writing that was appropriate to that horrendous event was journalism, reportage. And, in fact, I think the profession rose quite honorably to the task. Novelists require a slower turnover, I mean, in time.

Briony began to understand the chasm that lay between an idea and its execution.