I like ideas. I find them more exciting than human behavior for the most part.

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

The secret of survival is a defective imagination.

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

I have this fantasy. I'm walking past a bookshop and I click my fingers and all my books go blank. So I can start again and get it right.

And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.

I am the worst judge of my books.