I rather like getting away from fiction.

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.

Discovering the truth of who you are is the only way to love and care for yourself.

Truth - An ingenious compound of desirability and appearance.

The autobiographical self is built on the basis of past memories and memories of the plans that we have made; it's the lived past and the anticipated future.

Anything less would not have been worthy of me. Anything more would not have been possible.

You have options when it comes to abortion now. It's not like 1955 when you just had to kick her down a staircase and hope for the best... you feed her a tapeworm and hope it takes a left at the Y.

The method of Fluxions is the general key by help whereof the modern mathematicians unlock the secrets of Geometry, and consequently of Nature.

A fine picture is but the image of nature; a finished ballet is nature herself.

Nothing exists in the intellect that has not first gone through the senses.

Millennials aren't looking for a hipper Christianity.

We moved together very slowly toward the house, trying to understand its ugliness and ruin and shame.