Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.

The novel is resilient, and so are novelists.

I'm a hopeless 19th-century romantic.

Yes, this is what I thought adulthood would be, a kind of long indian summer, a state of tranquility, of calm incuriousness, with nothing left of the barely bearable raw immediacy of childhood, all the things solved that had puzzled me when I was small, all mysteries settled, all questions answered, and the moments dripping away, unnoticed almost, drip by golden drip, toward the final, almost unnoticed, quietus.

What is money, after all? Almost nothing, when one has a sufficiency of it.

Ian McEwan is a very good writer; the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters.

I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.