The moment you have children and a mortgage you want things to work; you're locked into the human project and you want it to flourish.

He would work through the night and sleep until lunch. There wasn't really much else to do. Make something, and die.

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

I want to live in a place where strangers rush to help someone in distress.

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 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.