...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left

I'm a hopeless 19th-century romantic.

All a work of art can do is present the surface. I can't know the insides of people. I know very little about the inside of myself.

All my life I have lied. I lied to escape, I lied to be loved, I lied for placement and power; I lied to lie. It was a way of living; lies are life's almost-anagram.

The trouble with you, Vic," he said, "is that you think of the world as a sort of huge museum with too many visitors allowed in.

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

Happiness was different in childhood. It was so much then a matter simply of accumulation, of taking things - new experiences, new emotions - and applying them like so many polished tiles to what would someday be the marvellously finished pavilion of the self.