Politics Is The Enemy Of The Imagination.

Narrative Tension Is Primarily About Withholding Information.

Scientists Do Stand On The Shoulders Of Giants, Just As Do Writers. Conversely, In The Arts We Do Make Discoveries. We Do Refine Our Tools. So I Am Arguing With, Or At Least Playing With, The Idea That Art Never Improves.

Novels Help Us To Resist The Temptation To Think Of The Past As Deficient.

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.

It Marked The Beginning And, Of Course, An End. At That Moment A Chapter, No, A Whole Stage Of My Closed. Had I Known, And Had There Been A Spare Second Or Two, I Might Have Allowed Myself A Little Nostalgia.