Simon Mawer Quotes

#1. 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.

Simon Mawer

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

Simon Mawer

#3. 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.

Simon Mawer

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

Simon Mawer

#5. Faith is the enemy of discovery.

Simon Mawer

#6. 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.

Simon Mawer

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

Simon Mawer

#8. 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.

Simon Mawer

#9. A work of art like this,' he tells one of the journalists, 'demands that the life lived in it be a work of art as well. I am certain that Viktor Landauer and his beautiful wife will do the place justice.

Simon Mawer

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

Simon Mawer

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

Simon Mawer

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

Simon Mawer

#13. It is difficult to reconstruct an emotion. At times it is difficult even to admit to one. I have practiced long and hard at denying entry to such twin imposters as triumph and disaster, or love and hate, but sometimes the barriers are breached.

Simon Mawer

#14. 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.

Simon Mawer

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

Simon Mawer

#16. Reality is brutal or painful or frightening, but waiting is a distillate of fear that corrodes and dissolves.

Simon Mawer

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

Simon Mawer

#18. She knows what it is to be sad and miserable, but those emotions are almost enjoyable. They throw moments of happiness and laughter into sharper relief.

Simon Mawer

#19. 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.

Simon Mawer

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

Simon Mawer

#21. 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.

Simon Mawer

#22. To be brave, you have to have a choice.

Simon Mawer

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

Simon Mawer