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

In my books you have to concentrate, but I work hard to make it that, when you do, the rewards are quite high.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s devoted Beckett readers greeted each successively shorter volume from the master with a mixture of awe and apprehensiveness; it was like watching a great mathematician wielding an infinitesimal calculus, his equations approaching nearer and still nearer to the null point.

I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.

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

The first thought that occurred to me, that night when I heard the chairman of the jury announce my name, was, Just think how many people hate me at this moment. Naturally, I wanted to annoy those people even further by being arrogant.

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.