The past is our ultimate privacy; we pile it up, year by year, decade by decade, it stows itself away, with its perverse random recall system.

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.

On Love - Love without trust is the love you give a dog. You may call that cute little mutt a member of the family but you don't let him in the kitchen when there's a roast on the table.

I believe we were right for each other, but not in that moment, which perhaps hindered any possibility of a future.

I'd rather love a million times and have my heart broken every time, than hold a permanitely empty heart forever.

I personally do not owe the debt that was owed by the campaign.

No one has ever been able to pinpoint the trigger." "But?" "But it is legend that ambrosia only rises when-" She held her breath. "- an archangel loves true.

That Bill Clinton. He probably doesn't know how to log on to the Internet.

Strength and struggle travel together.

What writers do - everything comes from inside, from experiences of the world that we have digested. And then we turn it into silk, or stories.

One of the functions of government is to act as a safeguard not just of property but of our liberties.