If people don't read, that's their choice; a lifelong book habit may itself be some sort of affliction.

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.

Believe in love. Believe in magic. Hell, believe in Santa Clause. Believe in others. Believe in yourself. Believe in your dreams. If you don’t, who will?

There are times in my 30 years in the theater that I have come perilously close to losing faith in the one form of action I have in this life.

I collect books, and I love libraries. I love bookstores. And to me meeting a writer is important. And when I saw a book with my name on it I almost passed out.

We are moving from a chain of command to a web of connection, from competition to collaboration, from markets to networks and stockholders to stakeholders, and greed to green.

If you want to be the best, find out what the top people do & do it yourself.

So far as the Angels are recipients of that spiritual heat and light they are loves and wisdoms, not loves and wisdoms for themselves, but from the Lord.

Accept what you can not change-change that which is unacceptable.

A man's opinion is in others; his being is in himself.

If goodness is its own reward, shouldn't we get a little something for being naughty?

God is, to me, pretty much a myth created over time to deny the idea that we're all responsible for our own actions.