The law is all about drawing clear lines. Life is not like that.

Some people write to me and say, 'You only ever wrote one good book'. And others say, 'I just love what you've been doing since "Atonement". I'm pleased that there isn't a consensus. But there are some pale young men who think "Comfort of Strangers" is the one.

[on writing 'The Children Act' , about a marriage in crisis] I hung around the courts and spent time with judges. The family court seems neglected in fiction. The judgments I was reading - about the end of love, and the separation of goods and money, and the destinies of children and medical ethics - so many of them are things that fiction routinely deals with.

[on writing the libretto for a new opera ('For You': 2008)] What I've discovered and really confirmed to myself is that opera really likes loud colours, and you need something bold, something savage, unpredictable, passionate. You can't really run a two-hour opera round some muted murmuring.

Atheists have as much conscience, possibly more, than people with deep religious conviction, and they still have the same problem of how they reconcile themselves to a bad deed in the past. It's a little easier if you've got a god to forgive you.

I've yet to meet somebody who said, "Your stories are so revolting I couldn't read them."

I always used to deny this, but I guess what I'm really saying is that I was writing to shock. . . . And I dug deep and dredged up all kinds of vile things which fascinated me at the time. [about his early fiction, which is filled with blood and perversion]