It is not the first duty of the novelist to provide blueprints for insurrection, or uplifting tales of successful resistance for the benefit of the opposition. The naming of what is there is what is important.

Politics is the enemy of the imagination.

By concentrating on what is good in people, by appealing to their idealism and their sense of justice, and by asking them to put their faith in the future, socialists put themselves at a severe disadvantage.

One has to have the courage of one's pessimism.

It is not the first duty of the novelist to provide blueprints for insurrection, or uplifting tales of successful resistance for the benefit of the opposition. The naming of what is there is what is important.

You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

A twenty-one-year-old writer is likely to be inhibited by a lack of usable experience. Childhood and adolescence were something I knew.

Atheists have as much conscience, possibly more, than people with deep religious conviction, and they still have the same problem of how they reconcile themselves to a bad deed in the past. It's a little easier if you've got a god to forgive you.

I always used to deny this, but I guess what I'm really saying is that I was writing to shock... And I dug deep and dredged up all kinds of vile things which fascinated me at the time.

I don't believe there's any inherent darkness at the center of religion at all. I think religion actually is a morally neutral force.

I don't hold grudges.

I think of novels in architectural terms. You have to enter at the gate, and this gate must be constructed in such a way that the reader has immediate confidence in the strength of the building.

I was an intimate sort of child who never spoke up in groups. I preferred close friends.

I wouldn't mind being the lead guitarist in an incredibly successful rock band. However, I don't play the guitar.

In my experience an appreciative letter from a fellow writer means a lot.

It should simply be an empirical matter whether the climate is changing or not and whether we're responsible. But the various sides of the debate have now become so tribal that it's no longer a matter of changing our views as more information comes in.

It's good to get your hands dirty a bit and to test how you see things at a given point. And it's very pleasing after writing something like 'Atonement' or 'On Chesil Beach,' which are historical, to get involved in some plausible re-enactment of the here and now.

My father's drinking was sometimes a problem. And a great deal went unspoken. He was not particularly acute or articulate about the emotions. But he was very affectionate towards me.

Not being boring is quite a challenge.

Now, I'm an atheist. I really don't believe for a moment that our moral sense comes from a god.

One important theme is the extent to which one can ever correct an error, especially outside any frame of religious forgiveness. All of us have done something we regret - how we manage to remove that from our conscience, or whether that's even possible, interested me.

Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist.

Reading reviews makes you thin-skinned. It's like waves washing layers off your skin.

The end of secrecy would be the end of the novel - especially the English novel. The English novel requires social secrecy, personal secrecy.

True intelligence requires fabulous imagination.

What I've discovered and really confirmed to myself is that opera really likes loud colours, and you need something bold, something savage, unpredictable, passionate. You can't really run a two-hour opera round some muted murmuring.

What is it precisely, that feeling of 'returning' from a poem? Something is lighter, softer, larger - then it fades, but never completely.

What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike?

You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.

All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.

Duty, Honor, Country. Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be.

Last year, the Assembly of the League, as a result of the initiative taken by the Scandinavian nations, further limited and clarified all the provisions of the clause prescribing the duty of states to participate in sanctions.

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

Let everyone regulate his conduct... by the golden rule of doing to others as in similar circumstances we would have them do to us, and the path of duty will be clear before him.

Painting is a faith, and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion.

Marriage is the miracle that transforms a kiss from a pleasure into a duty.

To vote is like the payment of a debt, a duty never to be neglected, if its performance is possible.

Our duty, as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation.

My first duty to write a gripping yarn. Second is to convey credible characters who make you feel what they feel. Only third comes the idea.

Every Christian will allow that sin is an evil, and that it is our duty not to commit sin.

Poland is an ally of the United States of America. It was our duty to show that we are a reliable, loyal, and predictable ally. America needed our help, and we had to give it.

Whenever I found out anything remarkable, I have thought it my duty to put down my discovery on paper, so that all ingenious people might be informed thereof.

The writer's duty is to keep on writing.

I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing.

Churchill knew the importance of peace, and he also knew the price of it. Churchill finally got his voice, of course. He stressed strategy, but it was his voice that armed England at last with the old-fashioned moral concepts of honor and duty, justice and mercy.

As a medical doctor, it is my duty to evaluate the situation with as much data as I can gather and as much expertise as I have and as much experience as I have to determine whether or not the wish of the patient is medically justified.

Do your duty and a little more and the future will take care of itself.

Man is a living duty, a depository of powers that he must not leave in a brute state. Man is a wing.

Never had there been such an attempt to make conquest the servant of civilization. About keeping India there is no question. England has a real duty there.