If we had not met, that day, I think I would have imagined you somehow.

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.

You smiled and talked to me of nothing and I felt that for this I had been waiting long.

Forgiveness is the highest degree of a trust in a better man

It is vital that when educating our children's brains that we do not neglect to educate their hearts.

Scandal is great entertainment because it allows people to feel contempt, a moral emotion that gives feeling of moral superiority while asking nothing in return.

She wondered if all the firsts in her life would go by so quickly, and be forgotten just as quickly.

To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.

I love it when the team scores... the lads are always giving me stick because of it, but I'm just so happy I can't help it.

There is a stage in any misery when the victim begins to find a deep satisfaction in it.

I grow daily to honor facts more and more, and theory less and less.

The events of life have never fallen into the form of the short story or the form of the poem, or into any other form.Yourown consciousnessisthe only formyouneed.