I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction a….

The day is refracted, and the next and the one after that, all of them broken up into a hundred juggled segments, each brilliant and self-contained s….

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….

Mythology is much better stuff than history. It has form; logic; a message..

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 ….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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..

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….