Simon Mawer
Simon Mawer
Simon Maweris a British author who lives in Italy...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionAuthor
alone
I find it very easy to be alone. I'm a writer, for heaven's sakes!
dictated time
Only occasionally do I read new fiction. Most of my reading is heavily dictated by what I'm writing at the time.
busy cliffs climbing heard island itself sea sheer spent utterly village wonderful year
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.
blank novelist pundits
Pundits always have something to write about; the novelist just has a blank screen.
novelists perpetual
Sometimes I think that novelists suffer from P.C.S.: Perpetual Childhood Syndrome.
faith lying philosophy
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.
people saws type
Most of those people who saw themselves as literary types at university became bank managers.
sin absence
Sin is absence of God. Nothing more, nothing less.
mind inability denial
The speed of the human mind is remarkable. So is its inability to face the obvious.
shelter chance barricades
If God resides anywhere ... surely he shelters behind barricades of pure chance.
faith discovery enemy
Faith is the enemy of discovery.
academic convincing course
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.