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

I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.

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.

We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.

For memory, we use our imagination. We take a few strands of real time and carry them with us, then like an oyster we create a pearl around them.

Doing what you do well is death. Your duty is to keep trying to do things that you don't do well, in the hope of learning.