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.

i'm going mad, i told myself. let me not be mad.

The cost of oblivius daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realigment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.
Her reverie, once rich in plausible details, had become a passing silliness before the hard mass of the actual.
It was difficult to come back.

He knew these last lines by heart and mouthed them now in the darkness. My reason for life. Not living, but life. That was the touch. And she was his reason for life, and why he must survive.

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

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.