I'm intrigued by the way in which physical appearance can often direct a person's life; things happen differently for a beautiful woman than for a plain one.

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.

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

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

behind each breakaway movement is a breakaway demagogue who will set up his breakaway demagogue government.

Saying of the ProphetEnvyEnvy devours good deeds, as a fire devours fuel.

If money controls our life, the devil will come into our life also to control that.

One great flaw in the reforming passion is that in its eagerness to remedy social wrongs it tends to neglect, certainly to undervalue, the experience of those whose lives it wishes to improve.

I think cinema is closer to allegories than to reality. It's closer to our dreams.

I think music is my favorite thing to do, but I go through periods where I think differently.

As long as you've got serious investors who wish to put money into football, I applaud. It proves that football is attractive. What upsets me, what I find scandalous is when clubs accept fools.

Bernie Sanders is usually speaking to the converted. He fires them up. It's a completely different style of campaigning that he's allergic to.

The paradise of the rich is made out of the hell of the poor.

It must be this rhapsody or none, The rhapsody of things as they are.