Occupation: Writer Birth: March 17, 1933
the days of our lives vanish utterly, more insubstantial than if they had been invented. Fiction can seem more enduring than reality..
I rather like getting away from fiction..
Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are..
You learn a lot, writing fiction..
I can remember the lush spring excitement of language in childhood. Sitting in church, rolling it around my mouth like marbles--tabernacle and pharis….
We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve….
I didn't write anything until I was well over 30..
I believe that the experience of childhood is irretrievable. All that remains, for any of us, is a headful of brilliant frozen moments, already dange….
There's a fearful term that's in fashion at the moment - closure. People apparently believe it is desirable and attainable..
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 walk about London and see a society that seems an absolutely revolutionary change from the 1950s, that seems completely and utterly different, ….
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….
Mythology is much better stuff than history. It has form; logic; a message..
All I know for certain is that reading is of the most intense importance to me; if I were not able to read, to revisit old favorites and experiment w….
The idea that memory is linear is nonsense. What we have in our heads is a collection of frames. As to time itself-can it be linear when all these sn….
Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present..
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 ….
I didn't want it to be a book that made pronouncements..
The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard..
I didn't think I had anything particular to say, but I thought I might have something to say to children..
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….