13 quotes found
“Writers owed their readers a duty of care, of mercy.”
“Everyone knew as much as they needed to know to be happy.”
“But this inglorious revolution wasn't for me. I didn't want a sex shop in every town.”
“The constrained lives of his characters made me wonder how my own existence might appear in his hands.”
“I was irritated by the way he conflated his own shifting needs with an impersonal destiny. I want it, therefore...it's in the stars!”
“I craved a form of naive realism. I paid special attention, I craned my readerly neck whenever a London street I knew was mentioned, or a style of frock, a real public person, even a make of car. T...”
“It's a matter of dishonour, and when it gets out, which it's bound to, this will be the one act you'll be remembered for. Everything else you achieved will be irrelevant. Your reputation will rest ...”
“In difficult moments its sometimes a good idea to ask yourself what it is you most want to be doing and consider how it can be achieved. If it cant, move on to the second best thing.”
“Growing up in a cathedral precinct, what did I know of the absurdities of communism, of how brave man and women in bleak and remote penal colonies were reduced to thinking day by day of nothing els...”
“There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authori...”
“These clever, amoral, inventive, destructive men, single-minded, selfish, emotionally cool, coolly attractive. I think I preferred them to the love of Jesus. They were so necessary, and not only to...”
“You pull a book from the shelf and there was an invention... Almost like cooking, I thought sleepily. Instead of heat transforming the ingredients, there's pure invention, the spark, the hidden ele...”
“While my friends struggled and calculated, I reached a solution by a set of floating steps that were partly visual, partly just a feeling for what was right. It was hard to explain how I knew what ...”
