All a work of art can do is present the surface. I can't know the insides of people. I know very little about the inside of myself.
If they give me the bloody prize, why can't they say nice things about me?
All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.
I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.
I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
In my books you have to concentrate, but I work hard to make it that, when you do, the rewards are quite high.
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.
It's great people still care about books, and it's great you can still fashion a life from literature.
The white May blossom swooned slowly into the open mouth of the grave.
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.
I like ideas. I find them more exciting than human behavior for the most part.
I am the worst judge of my books.
Ian McEwan is a very good writer; the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters.
Enormous morning, ponderous, meticulous; gray light streaking each bare branch, each single twig, along one side, making another tree, of glassy veins.
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.
All I wanted was to be left alone. They abhor a vacuum, other people. You find a quiet corner where you can hunker down in peace, and the next minute there they are, crowding around you in their party hats, tooting their paper whistles in your face and insisting you get up and join in the knees-up.
The trouble with you, Vic," he said, "is that you think of the world as a sort of huge museum with too many visitors allowed in.
The telephone ringing gave me a dreadful start. I have never got used to this machine, the way it crouches so malevolently, ready to start clamouring for attention when you least expect it, like a mad baby.
Yes, this is what I thought adulthood would be, a kind of long indian summer, a state of tranquility, of calm incuriousness, with nothing left of the barely bearable raw immediacy of childhood, all the things solved that had puzzled me when I was small, all mysteries settled, all questions answered, and the moments dripping away, unnoticed almost, drip by golden drip, toward the final, almost unnoticed, quietus.
The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
The effect of prizes on one's career - if that is what to call it - is considerable, since they give one more clout with publishers and more notoriety among journalists. The effect on one's writing, however, is nil - otherwise, one would be in deep trouble.
We artists love to talk tough, but we're just as sentimental as everyone else when it comes down to it.
The novel is resilient, and so are novelists.
The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.
...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
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