Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are.

I've always been fascinated by the operation of memory - the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence.

We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.

I'm not a historian but I can get interested - obsessively interested - with any aspect of the past, whether it's palaeontology or archaeology or the very recent past.

It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.

The present hardly exists, after all-it becomes the past even as it happens. A tricky medium, time - and central to the concerns of fiction.

We all act as hinges-fortuitous links between other people.

The consideration of change over the century is about loss, though I think that social change is gain rather than loss.

We all need a past - that's where our sense of identity comes from.

The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard.

Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.

The young always have the same problem - how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.

Canadians have been accustomed to define themselves by saying what they are not.

But now in this day and age, people are more prone to go out to try new things to enhance their performance on the field - to enhance their physical appearance.

Be like a lotus. Let the beauty of your heart speak.

Destroy the man of wicked thoughts, Like a bamboo-tree with its fruit.

Nothing truly convincing - which would possess thoroughness, vigor, and skill - has been written against the ancients as yet; especially not against their poetry.

For how tiny the world, This ant's egg-and the sky!

God is not all that exists. God is all that does not exist.

When you are praising or blessing you are on the highest frequency of love.

I didn't grow up thinking, 'Oh, maybe someday I'm going to have a shoe named after me.'