Maybe all of us at Hailsam had little secrets like that -- little private nooks created out of thin air where we could go off alone without fears and longing.

I can see,’ Miss Emily said, ‘that it might look as though you were simply pawns in a game. It can certainly be looked at like that. But think of it. You were lucky pawns. There was a certain climate and now it’s gone. You have to accept that sometimes that’s how things happen in the world. People’s opinions, their feelings, they go one way, then the other. It just so happens you grew up at a certain point in this process.’ ‘It might be just some trend that came and went,’ I said. ‘But for us, it’s our life.

An artist's concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.

I cannot start a story or chapter without knowing how it ends. ... Of course, it rarely ends that way.

Now when I look back to the Guildford of that time it seems far more exotic to me than Nagasaki.

I don't think it's any fun, even if you are one of the most respected authors in the world like Margaret Atwood, to keep being nominated and not win.

What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint.