All the answers you may wish for lie within faith, but it demands a complete and incontinent surrender, an immersion as total as any baptism. Indeed baptism is a kind of enactment of the surrender: you bathe in faith, you… — Simon Mawer Copy Share Image
I was a boarding school product from the age of eight, and I hated it. Though I do have a theory that boarding school… — Simon Mawer Copy Share Image
Guernsey itself was overcrowded, but its cliffs were utterly empty. I spent a wonderful year with a friend, climbing them. It was sheer magic:… — Simon Mawer Copy Share Image
You can tell nothing from a man's appearance, nothing except the depths of your own prejudice. — Simon Mawer Copy Share Image
Sometimes I think that novelists suffer from P.C.S.: Perpetual Childhood Syndrome. — Simon Mawer Copy Share Image
When you look around now we have the war on terror. Yes, okay, the World Trade Center was sort of like a single act… — Simon Mawer Copy Share Image
Grief and guilt. A powerful combination. Guilt like a liquid, a thin liquor, seeping everywhere, informing everything, saturating the whole-corrosive, like seawater, scented with… — Simon Mawer Copy Share Image
When writing fiction, you only have to know enough to be convincing on the page. I mean really convincing, of course - but you… — Simon Mawer Copy Share Image
Only occasionally do I read new fiction. Most of my reading is heavily dictated by what I'm writing at the time. — Simon Mawer Copy Share Image
“I'm fond of her." Oh yeah? Fond are you? I've heard of fond. I expect old erection here" - she pointed to the tube… — Simon Mawer Copy Share Image
Most of those people who saw themselves as literary types at university became bank managers. — Simon Mawer Copy Share Image
“Numbers have no hidden meanings, you say. But it is the hidden meanings in words that make them so wonderful.” — Simon Mawer Copy Share Image
“It wasn’t the way that Viktor and Katalin looked at each other, it was the way they didn’t look. It wasn’t the notes, it… — Simon Mawer Copy Share Image
Pundits always have something to write about; the novelist just has a blank screen. — Simon Mawer Copy Share Image
“It is difficult to reconstruct an emotion. At times it is difficult even to admit to one. I have practiced long and hard at… — Simon Mawer Copy Share Image
