29 Quotes by Simon Mawer

Sin is absence of God. Nothing more, nothing less.

I was a boarding school product from the age of eight, and I hated it. Though I do have a theory that boarding school is good training for writers because its so desperately lacking in privacy: you make space for yourself by having an interior life.

Most of those people who saw themselves as literary types at university became bank managers.

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

Numbers have no hidden meanings, you say. But it is the hidden meanings in words that make them so wonderful.

To be brave, you have to have a choice.

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 was the silences between the notes.

It is perfectly possible to believe two contradictory things at one and the same time – that is one of the brilliant faculties of the human mind.

The shutter of the photographer’s camera makes that repeated mechanical sound. That unlocking and locking of the doors of light to send momentary images of the present into the light trap of the past.