Be wary of too much calm, particularly in your mid-fifties.

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

was it possible that i was, in the modern term, in denial?

It is photography itself that creates the illusion of innocence. Its ironies of frozen narrative lend to its subjects an apparent unawareness that they will change or die. It is the future they are innocent of. Fifty years on we look at them with the godly knowledge of how they turne dout after all - who they married, the date of their death - with no thought for who will one day be holding photographs of us.

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

I'm delighted when people respond with passion and readily intensity to my work. Literature is not as the economist would put it a positional good; in other words, there is infinite space for good literature.

I find it very difficult to talk about unwritten works. It's never useful to start putting words casually around the flimsiest of notions. I finished Saturday only in late November and I'm now in the rather pleasant stage of traveling, reading and waiting.