There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history.

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.

It is a full-time job to cope with alien elements from both interpersonal sources and societal influences.

Nixon has enough to overcome in terms of his legacy and his political history. Now he has to overcome the in-fighting between his daughters. It's so sad. There's another obstacle for him to clear.

I go in for the eye test, and I don't know about you, but I concentrate like crazy during the eye exam. You don't want to get no 'D' on that thing and end up with these big thick Coke bottle glasses.

He who owns the soil, owns up to the sky.

To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.

As far as my opinion on galleries, I think they are a great thing. I see them as another outlet. I'm sure by now you've figured out that I do my work for everybody to see. That's the whole point.

It can certainly happen that characters in more sophisticated stories can "take over" as they develop and change the author's original ideas. Well, it certainly happens to me at times.

You have to ask these questions: who pays the piper, and what is valuable in this life?

I'm not really a very social person. It exhausts me when I'm out.

An ambassador is not simply an agent; he is also a spectacle.