29 Quotes by Simon Mawer

Guernsey itself was overcrowded, but its cliffs were utterly empty. I spent a wonderful year with a friend, climbing them. It was sheer magic: you went from this pretty, busy village of an island to the sea cliffs and heard nothing but the gulls and the waves.

When writing fiction, you only have to know enough to be convincing on the page. I mean really convincing, of course - but you don't need academic depth.

Sometimes I think that novelists suffer from P.C.S.: Perpetual Childhood Syndrome.

Pundits always have something to write about; the novelist just has a blank screen.

Faith is the enemy of discovery.

You can tell nothing from a man's appearance, nothing except the depths of your own prejudice.

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 the rich stench of ordure and corruption, and carrying with it hard, abrasive shards of grief.

If God resides anywhere ... surely he shelters behind barricades of pure chance.

The speed of the human mind is remarkable. So is its inability to face the obvious.