The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.

Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.

For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.

I'm always astounded at the way we automatically look at what divides and separates us. We never look at what people have in common.

There's an unconscious bias in our society: girls are wonderful; boys are terrible. And to be a boy, or young man, growing up, having to listen to all this, it must be painful.

The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise . . . but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us - for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.

You remember with what you are at the time you are remembering.