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

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

We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.

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 very recent past.

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

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.

We all act as hinges-fortuitous links between other people.

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

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

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

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

They are les misérables - the outcasts, the underdogs. And who is to blame? Is it not the most fallen who have most need of charity?

My hair is way, way long. I've hitchhiked across the country a zillion times. I've ridden in every car. I was never a hippie. It takes more than long hair.

A big part of life is realizing what you're good at.

It is not true that Congress spends money like a drunken sailor. Drunken sailors spend their own money. Congress spends our money.

You're never going to be gentle enough with the person who is your guest.

Outside his own ever-narrowing field of specialization, a scientist is a layman. What members of an academy of science have in common is a certain form of semiparasitic living.

One of the ultimate things a human can learn is kindness for their fellow humans

I feel like you have to tell people who you are, but you don't have to be disrespectful about it. But you also don't have to be a shrinking violet.

The willingness to consider possibility requires a tolerance of uncertainty.

Looking back, nothing seems so simple than a utopian vision realised.