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.

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.

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.

She's so small, yet she contains so much evil.

We have to have a revolution so that all young people grasp empathy and practice it. This is the most fundamental revolution that we have to get through.

It's in the public domain. That's one of the reasons I do it so much. But luckily, it's a brilliant film [ Night Of The Living Dead]. Every horror aficionado must see that film at least once.

There is a story of an Oxford student who once remarked, "I despise all Americans, but have never met one I didn't like."

I'd rather have 1% of the effort of 100 men than 100% of my own effort.

If i can do just one tenth of the good Michael Jackson did for others, i can really make a difference in this world

My mom was a screenwriter. I saw a lot of people who didn't seem very fulfilled creatively or otherwise by their roles in the motion picture industry.

The shortest distance between two jokes makes a perfect speech.

In a tavern everybody puts on airs except the landlord.

The art of work . . . It is going to your work as you go to worship, with a prayer of thankfulness and the aspiration to serve.