I would be far more critical than any reviewer could be of my own work. So I simply don't read them.

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

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

I shall strip away layer after layer of grime -- the toffee-colored varnish and caked soot left by a lifetime of dissembling -- until I come to the very thing itself and know it for what it is. My soul. My self.

Most crime fiction, no matter how 'hard-boiled' or bloodily forensic, is essentially sentimental, for most crime writers are disappointed romantics.

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.

I'm a hopeless 19th-century romantic.