You never know if you're a writer. You can't trust it. If you woke up and said, "I'm a writer," it would be gone. You wouldn't see anything for miles - even the dust would be running away.

Google is so strange. It promises everything, but everything isn’t there. You type in the words for what you need, and what you need becomes superfluous in an instant, shadowed instantaneously by the things you really need, and none of them answerable by Google.

All we need to do, reader or writer, from first line to final page, is be as open as a book, and be alive to the life in language - on all its levels.

My father is from Newark in Nottinghamshire and my mother is from the very north of Ireland. They've ended up in Scotland, where my father - well, both of them - will always be seen as having come from somewhere else.

I want to be bored. But I can't. But I really don't want to be this thing that I'm having to be instead of being bored.

To be known so well by someone is an unimaginable gift. But to be imagined so well by someone is even better.

Every great narrative is at least two narratives, if not more - the thing that is on the surface and then the things underneath which are invisible.