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….

Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present..

I didn't write anything until I was well over 30..

There's a fearful term that's in fashion at the moment - closure. People apparently believe it is desirable and attainable..

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

I've always been fascinated by the operation of memory - the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence..

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

Born in Jerusalem, Wadie Said went from being a dragoman to a salesman in the United States and thence to a hugely successful businessman in Egypt..

You have this comet trail of your own lived life, sparks from which arrive in the head all the time, whether you want them or not - life has been liv….

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

Forever, reading has been central, the necessary fix, the support system. Her life has been informed by reading. She has read not just for distractio….

I am addicted to arrivals, to those innocent dawn moments from which history accelerates..

I'm now an agnostic but I grew up on the King James version, which I'm eternally grateful for..

I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation..

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

The consideration of change over the century is about loss, though I think that social change is gain rather than loss..

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….

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..

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….

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..

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….