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.

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.

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.

Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.

Transferring my anger and pain onto paper turns it into something tangible, something that can be shredded or burned, or at the very least, sealed shut in a box. ~Call Me Tuesday

I refuse to spend my life worrying about what I eat. There is no pleasure worth forgoing just for an extra three years in the geriatric ward.

One compromise here, another there and soon enough the so-called Christian and the man in the world look the same.

A man can't retire his experience.

I'm so sick and tired of hearing about slavery. You think slavery didn't exist in Africa? Even Indian tribes.

Encourage 'random' picks on the ball because they cannot be scouted

People who let the weak or greedy drink their blood sometimes have a need to play God.

Voters are saying "I like this guy [Donald Trump]. He just might shake this place up."

The human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.

I guess we're really brothers, aren't we? Don't know what that means, except it means that some of the same things we remember.