I didn't write anything until I was well over 30.

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.

Given that I don’t know anything, when I am making up stories about the future, why not make it a good story instead of a scary one?

You need to know it's your actions that will make you a good person, not desire.

Can a mother commit a greater sin than ignoring her intuitions?

I'm Paige," I whispered. He was serious, for once. "Are you the first page, or the last?" I didn't answer, not right then.

I've never left for New York. I've stood my ground here my whole career and hopefully will be able to until the day that I die.

I think of myself as being a bit of a wimp deep down - a bourgeois wimp - and I'm fighting that. I think all Brits are, maybe.

So many of us had been armed that there were holsters and weapons scattered among the passed-out bodies like mercenary prizes in a fleshy Cracker Jack box.

Put anger aside. It is not a solution. Patience and love is a solution. With compassion and action, together we can end slavery.

May the passion to be all that God wants you to be sweep across your soul like a gentle breeze.

'Tis well enough for a servant to be bred at an University. But the education is a little too pedantic for a gentleman.