It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd..

The past is our ultimate privacy; we pile it up, year by year, decade by decade, it stows itself away, with its perverse random recall system..

I'm intrigued by the way in which physical appearance can often direct a person's life; things happen differently for a beautiful woman than for a pl….

And in another year everything will be different yet again. It is always like that, and always will be; you are forever standing on the brink, in a p….

We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance..

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..

It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency..

Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing..

If people don't read, that's their choice; a lifelong book habit may itself be some sort of affliction..

Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going..

Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are..

Perhaps I shall not write my account of the Paleolithic at all, but make a film of it. A silent film at that, in which I shall show you first the gre….

I can remember the lush spring excitement of language in childhood. Sitting in church, rolling it around my mouth like marbles--tabernacle and pharis….

The place didn't look the same but it felt the same; sensations clutched and transformed me. I stood outside some concrete and plate-glass tower-bloc….

History unravels; circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled..

We all need a past - that's where our sense of identity comes from..

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

the days of our lives vanish utterly, more insubstantial than if they had been invented. Fiction can seem more enduring than reality..

You learn a lot, writing fiction..

I have long been interested in landscape history, and when younger and more robust I used to do much tramping of the English landscape in search of a….

The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard..