SIMON MAWER

Faith is the enemy of discovery.

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

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

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

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.

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

I find it very easy to be alone. I'm a writer, for heaven's sakes!

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.

One of the reasons I wrote 'The Fall' is that climbing's more than a sport, it's a way of life. When you're in it, it's all you think about.

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 it's so desperately lacking in privacy: you make space for yourself by having an interior life.

I find it very easy to be alone. I'm a writer, for heaven's sakes!

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.

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 it's so desperately lacking in privacy: you make space for yourself by having an interior life.

Only occasionally do I read new fiction. Most of my reading is heavily dictated by what I'm writing at the time.

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

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.

One of the reasons I wrote 'The Fall' is that climbing's more than a sport, it's a way of life. When you're in it, it's all you think about.

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

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

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

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

Faith is the enemy of discovery.

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

When you look around now we have the war on terror. Yes, okay, the World Trade Center was sort of like a single act of war, but nothing else has been. We've turned it into war. We're talking about a bunch of semi-lunatic, fanatic criminals. That's the way they should be treated.

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

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 swim in it, you live by it, surrounded by it, buoyed up by it, engulfed by it. You drown in it, for at times it takes your breath away as entirely as any lungful of water.... All the answers lie in faith; and when you lose your faith you have no choice but to substitute for if a philosophy that deliberately and coldly offers no answers at all.

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.