The novel is resilient, and so are novelists.

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

I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.

In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.

I live in Dublin, God knows why. There are greatly more congenial places I could have settled in - Italy, France, Manhattan - but I like the climate here, and Irish light seems to be essential for me and for my writing.

The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.

These days I must take the world in small and carefully measured doses. It is a sort of homeopathic cure I am undergoing, though I am not certain what this cure is meant to mend. Perhaps I am learning to live amongst the living again. Practising, I mean. But no, that is not it. Being here is just a way of not being anywhere.