I didn't think I had anything particular to say, but I thought I might have something to say to children.

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.

Singers, actors or artists who touch on sorrow are trying to give comfort to aggrieved souls by giving some meaning to their sorrows.

It's brainless to assume that making changes to your window's view will give a new perspective

Let no one who loves be called unhappy. Even love unreturned has its rainbow.

My ginger tabby cat Oscar - he's got his own passport - he comes everywhere with me.

The artist must reckon with his own character flaws, which do not disappear just because he has been called to be an artist.

You don't have to know everything as long as you know people who know the things you don't

Hope will lie to you, but lust is what it is; it never lies.

I know it's simple, but my main inspiration is just my love of music. I know that sounds overly naive. But it's true.

Nobody gives twenty-five million dollars to anybody if they're not getting twenty-five million worth out of it. Forget it. It just doesn't happen.

I want to change the color of Starbucks from green to red. Whose job was it to say, This is going to be green? I want that to be my job.