Author Quotes

I'm very fortunate in that I don't have money problems. I have lunch with my wife at home. I don't have to commute, so I have much more time with my family.

I was a little concerned that a lot of people thought I wrote Merchant Ivory movies. I also thought if I was ever going to write something strange and difficult, that was the time.

I think I had actually served my apprenticeship as a writer of fiction by writing all those songs. I had already been through phases of autobiographical or experimental stuff.

I had been plunged into a different world. I found myself spending half my time answering weird questions on book tours in the Midwest. People would stand up and explain to me the situation in their office and ask me whether they should resign or not.

I felt slightly superior to student politics, for instance. I had no reason to think this, but I thought of myself as slightly more seasoned. I became quite cynical talking to my student friends.

I do feel part of that generation of people who were rather idealistic in the '70s and became disillusioned in the '80s. Not just about social services issues, but the world.

I couldn't speak Japanese very well, passport regulations were changing, I felt British, and my future was in Britain. And it would also make me eligible for literary awards. But I still think I'm regarded as one of their own in Japan.

As a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.

When you become a parent, or a teacher, you turn into a manager of this whole system. You become the person controlling the bubble of innocence around a child, regulating it.

There are things I am more interested in than the clone thing. How are they trying to find their place in the world and make sense of their lives? To what extent can they transcend their fate? As time starts to run out, what are the things that really matter?

All children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma.

One should never write down or up to people, but out of yourself.

Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique, and not too much imagination.

I'll bet Shakespeare compromised himself a lot; anybody who's in the entertainment industry does to some extent.

What irritates me is the bland way people go around saying, 'Oh, our attitude has changed. We don't dislike these people any more.' But by the strangest coincidence, they haven't taken away the injustice; the laws are still on the books.

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.

California is a tragic country - like Palestine, like every Promised Land.

I made a mistake when I said there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz.

I have no academic qualifications whatsoever.

History is like a constantly changing tree.

Without Hitler, the State of Israel probably would not exist today. To that extent he was probably the Jews' greatest friend.

The wise man is he who knows the relative value of things.

The soul is dyed with the color of its leisure thoughts.

The proper time to influence the character of a child is about a hundred years before he is born.

The object of studying philosophy is to know one's own mind, not other people's.

Man, as we know him, is a poor creature; he is halfway between an ape and a god and he is travelling in the right direction.

Love remembered and consecrated by grief belongs, more clearly than the happy intercourse of friends, to the eternal world; it has proved itself stronger than death.

Let none of us delude himself by supposing that honesty is always the best policy. It is not.

It was said that Mr. Gladstone could persuade most people of most things, and himself of anything.

In praising science, it does not follow that we must adopt the very poor philosophies which scientific men have constructed. In philosophy they have much more to learn than to teach.