All I know is that I've wasted all these years looking for something, a sort of trophy I'd get only if I really, really did enough to deserve it. But….

Love isn't about when you first meet. It's about the many, many years you spend together, when you're trying to keep that flame burning..

Don’t you wonder sometimes, what might have happened if you tried?.

Many of our deepest motives come, not from an adult logic of how things work in the world, but out of something that is frozen from childhood..

I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-decepti….

I want my words to survive translation..

I don't have a deep link with England like, say, Jonathan Coe or Hanif Kureishi might demonstrate. For me it is like a mythical place..

Now naturally, like many of us, I have a reluctance to change too much of the old ways..

What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint..

It is all very well, in these changing times, to adapt one's work to take in duties not traditionally within one's realm; but bantering is of another….

One need hardly dwell on the catastrophic possibility of uttering a bantering remark only to discover it wholly inappropriate.

She might be a great person, but life's so much bigger than just loving someone..

An artist's concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it..

To see the best before I have properly begun would be somewhat premature..

Typically in my novels the narrator tells a story by remembering, and the memories are colored by this and colored by that. So the whole universe of ….

I think it's quite difficult to understand what kind of life a writer leads. They might be millionaires, or they might be starving people..

Because maybe, in a way, we didn't leave it behind nearly as much as we might once have thought. Because somewhere underneath, a part of us stayed li….

Now when I look back to the Guildford of that time it seems far more exotic to me than Nagasaki..

And so we stood together like that, at the top of that field for what seemed like ages, not saying anything, just holding each other, while the wind ….

I felt slightly superior to student politics, for instance. I had no reason to think this, but I thought of myself as slightly more seasoned. I becam….

When we lost something precious, and we'd looked and looked and still couldn't find it, then we didn't have to be completely heartbroken. We still ha….