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

When anything can happen, everything matters.

I was the basest of readers. All I wanted was my own world, and myself in it, given back to me in artful shapes and accessible form.

I've always thought cruelty is a failure of imagination.

He saw that no one owned anything really. It's all rented, or borrowed. Our possessions will outlast us, we'll desert them in the end.

Twenty years ago I might have hired a professional listener, but somewhere along the way I had lost faith in the talking cure. A genteel fraud in my view.

I think the Americans are dying to leave Iraq. I was against the war but longed for the fall of Saddam; the decision to go to war clearly was taken long before the matter reached the U.N., given its inevitability. I kept my fingers crossed for the emergence of democracy in Iraq even if that would mean victory for a man whose politics I have little sympathy with.