Top 11 Quotes by Simon Mawer

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

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

Simon Mawer

Thinking, Childhood, Suffering

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

Simon Mawer

Sin, Absence

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

Simon Mawer

Mind, Inability, Denial

Simon Mawer (2011). “The Gospel Of Judas”, p.132, Hachette UK

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.

Simon Mawer

War, World, Terror

Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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

Simon Mawer

Shelter, Chance, Barricades

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

Powerful, Grief, Guilt

Simon Mawer (2011). “The Gospel Of Judas”, p.149, Hachette UK

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

Simon Mawer

Men, Depth, Prejudice

Faith is the enemy of discovery.

Simon Mawer

Faith, Discovery, Enemy

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.

Simon Mawer

Faith, Lying, Philosophy

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.

Simon Mawer

School, Eight, Space

"A life in books" by Sarah Crown, www.theguardian.com. October 2, 2009.