It's not a crime not to know yourself. It's not a crime to send life away. It's just a shame.

Like children all over the world, by the age of 10 I'd come to believe that most of the really humane creatures were not really human at all.

The working class of England take their deracination completely for granted. Disenchantment is the happy code that informs every byway of the underclass: service jobs, celebrity dreams, Lotto wins, leisured poverty on pre-crunch credit cards, it's all there, part of the story of an English people whose grandparents never had it so good.

It's not a crime not to know yourself. It's not a crime to send life away. It's just a shame.

Traveling alone offers the chance to test the limits of what you think you know about yourself.

We do not read to pass the time, but to inhabit time.

I've been asked which of the other arts novel-writing is most like, and I have come to believe it is acting. Of course, in terms of pattern it can be like music, in terms of structure it can be like painting, but the job to me is most like acting.