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.

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.

I became hooked on the idea of being able to shoot an image and process it myself, and end up with a product.

At the end, the realization is that she had to get to a place in her life where she could drop her guard and make peace with the fact that whether she had a small amount of time, that she had to kind of live it completely through, instead of living by the rules.

All enterprises that are entered into with indiscreet zeal may be pursued with great vigor at first, but are sure to collapse in the end.

I don't write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it's finished, it's done.

Young actors often don't think of the consequences of doing nudity or sex scenes. They want the role so badly that they agree to be exploited, and then end up embarrassing family, friends, and even strangers.

They haul you up there for, you know, week after week in this kind of star chamber proceeding. Then at the end of it they say, well, we found nothing, but now it's time for special counsel.

The difference between talking on your cell phone while driving and speaking with a passenger is huge. The person on the other end of the cell phone is chattering away, oblivious.

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.

The big battle at the end of DW isn't drawn from history, but it's influenced by history, certainly.

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.

I did know that the book would end with a mind-boggling trial, but I didn't know exactly how it would turn out. I like a little suspense when I am writing, too.

If he didn't fall in love he would have never come back near the end of the film. Because, what man is going to dishonor himself so that he comes back in front of the man that took a woman away from him... and warns her to save her life?

Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there.

Pacifist propaganda and the resolutions of the parliamentarians encouraged such treaties, and toward the end of the nineteenth century their number had increased considerably.

Will Arnett is one of the funniest guys I know. He has seen it all and done it all and come out the other end pretty savvy and pretty strong.

I'm the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime.

A liberal knows that the only certainty in this life is change but believes that the change can be directed toward a constructive end.

Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.

Towards the end of the Lord Chamberlain's era, when his hold was being loosened, private prosecutions began to happen. A member of staff at the Royal Court ordered to stop the play, and the police were brought in.

A palindrome is a word or pattern that instead of developing in different directions it folds in on itself so that the beginning and end mirror each other, that they are the same.