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

Thing is, we could discuss it out loud in front of the gentlemen over there, or you could get off my case and make a pleasant farewell. That is to say, fuck off.

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've yet to meet somebody who said, 'Your stories are so revolting I couldn't read them.'

At the risk of sounding like Virginia Woolf, I could live on £700 a year.

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