I've never had a moment's doubt. I love you. I believe in you completely. You are my dearest one. My reason for life.

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

The anticipation and dread he felt at seeing her was also a kind of sensual pleasure, and surrounding it, like an embrace, was a general elation--it might hurt, it was horribly inconvenient, no good might come of it, but he had found out for himself what it was to be in love, and it thrilled him.

At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.

It was always the view of my parents...that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people.

In the first half of the 20th Century, we lived through human disasters on a scale unimaginable. The Holocaust was once suggested would be the end of not only civilization, but art, too.

I'm not against religion in the sense that I feel I can't tolerate it, but I think written into the rubric of religion is the certainty of its own truth. And since there are 6,000 religions currently on the face of the earth, they can't all be right. And only the secular spirit can guarantee those freedoms and it's the secular spirit that they contest.