Don’t you wonder sometimes, what might have happened if you tried?

If you were a boy and a girl and you were in love with each other, really, properly in love, and if you could show it, then the people who run Hailsham, they sorted it out for you. They sorted it out so you could have a few years together before you began your donations.

There comes a point when you can more or less count the number of books you're going to write before you die.

And what made these heart-to-hearts possible--you might even say what made the whole friendship possible during that time--was this understanding we had that anything we told each other during these moments would be treated with careful respect: that we'd honor confidences, and that no matter how much we rowed, we wouldn't use against each other anything we'd talked about during those sessions.

I have the feeling of this completely alternative person I should have become. There was another life that I might have had, but I’m having this one.

I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.

As a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.