I believe that the experience of childhood is irretrievable. All that remains, for any of us, is a headful of brilliant frozen moments, already dangerously distorted by the wisdoms of maturity.

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.

There is something so biologically implausible that your attitude is going to cure a disease. There's a tremendous arrogance to imagine that your mind is all that powerful.

Smile, smile, smile at your mind as often as possible. Your smiling will considerably reduce your mind's tearing tension.

We live in age of prudence. The leaders of the people now generally follow.

Now, as I've gotten older I've been able to write more quickly. Sometimes I get in the space of something and I can do a lot in a day.

To be a woman in your forties, I think it's a fantastic decade.

I went to good schools, and I've just always had an allergic reaction to snobbishness - always found myself preferring to blend into the woodwork. I have an affinity to those who, in a sense, failed.

I think I couldn't give myself any advice apart from just do exactly what I want.

Never underestimate the stimulation of eccentricity.

[On what bugged him] A fine city with too many socialists and mosquitoes. At least you can spray the mosquitoes.

If you offer me a job sitting in a Winnebago with make-up girls and free food, I'm probably going to take it.