Politics is the enemy of the imagination.

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.

Our military commanders have said over and over again that a timetable for withdrawal sends the wrong message to our troops, but more importantly to our enemy.

Every dictator is an enemy of freedom, an opponent of law.

Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.

There are a lot of people out there who think that I am their worst enemy, and I don't even care if these people exist.

By this time it was past six, and the enemy's van and ours were at too great a distance to engage, I perceived some of their ships stretching to the northward; and I imagined they were going to form a new line.

To me our bombing policy appears to be suicidal. Not because it does not do vast damage to our enemy, it does; but because, simultaneously, it does vast damage to our peace aim, unless that aim is mutual economic and social annihilation.

Especially today as we fight the war on terror - against an enemy that represents hatred, extremism and stands behind no flag - we need to remember the sacrifices that have gone into protecting our flag.

No enemy is worse than bad advice.

The soldier's main enemy is not the opposing soldier, but his own commander.

This bored fantastic woman, with her animal nature, giving herself the pleasure of seeing her enemy struck down, not a particularly keen one for her because she is so weary of having all her desires satisfied.

Reason is the enemy of faith.

Politics is the enemy of the imagination.

If I liken the Pacific War to a football match, I can say to you that the first half is over, we have kicked off after the interval, and we are going to carry the ball into enemy territory for a smashing victory.

Wine is a turncoat; first a friend and then an enemy.

I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

Hatred is not contained in political thinking. Any hatred worked up against the public enemy is non-political, and always shows some weakness in the internal political situation.

No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.

Self-pity is our worst enemy and if we yield to it, we can never do anything wise in this world.

I really didn't have any plans to record prior to doing My Own Best Enemy.

Whatever the number of a man's friends, there will be times in his life when he has one too few; but if he has only one enemy, he is lucky indeed if he has not one too many.