We all act as hinges-fortuitous links between other people.

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.

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.

It's rude to stare, but the great thing about staring at a sedated person is that they don't know you're doing it.

Everyone here has the sense that right now is one of those moments when we are influencing the future.

If I were given a choice between two films and one was dark and explored depraved, troubled or sick aspects of our culture, I would always opt for that over the next romantic comedy.

It's better to have a broken CD player that worked once than to never have evolved into a self-aware carbon based lifeform.

Independence, the freedom of a self-governing nation, is in my estimation the highest political good, for which any disadvantage, if need be, and any sacrifice are a cheap price.

The airline business is it is mostly run by a bunch of spineless nincompoops who actually don't want to stand up to the environmentalists and call them the lying wankers that they are.

I find it hard to take rock groups very seriously or treat them with respect. There is something absurd about these gloomy young men getting together and banging away.

One thing I learned particularly at Yale was how to work with others

It was a marriage of convenience, as my father had a blister on his big toe and couldn't travel far to find a girl.

The best paradoxes raise questions about what kinds of contradictions can occur-what species of impossibilities are possible.