In old age, you realise that while you're divided from your youth by decades, you can close your eyes and summon it at will. As a writer it puts one at a distinct advantage.

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.

For there was never yet philosopher That could endure the toothache patiently.

I was supposed to be working on 'The Weekenders, ' but I was blocked. I got this crazy idea that I would make Christmas stockings out of blankets.

What's the point in being an unpopular writer? It just doesn't make a lot of sense. For me it doesn't, anyway.

We are so used to releasing words. We don't know what to do with them if they stay.

If a farmer calls me to a sick animal, he couldn't care less if I were George Bernard Shaw.

We don't choose our talents; but we needn't hide them in a napkin because they are not just what we want.

Remember where you have been and know where you are going. Life is not a race, but a journey to be savored each step of the way.

A noble cause doth ease much a grievous case.

Success means doing things you don't want to do.

What're quantum mechanics?" "I don't know. People who repair quantums, I suppose.