What we wish upon the future is very often the image of some lost, imagined past.

When people aren't expecting to be seen, they look their truest.

I can do hieroglyphics in the margin. There are days when I really enjoy the flow of ink. I mean, nice pen, ink straight on to the page.

When anything goes digital, let alone something as immaterial as a book, there is a tendency to see it as just in the air to be taken, and to lose the sense that somebody once made it.

Structure that really pays off is all based on emotion. I don't write down an elaborate plan. It's really done by feel. It's one area of my writing that I think I've got surer at as I've evolved. In my work you often get an abrupt shift in time, a jolt. But the emotional logic will take the reader on. I hope. I trust. After all, our memories do not work with any sequential logic.

I share my name with an aerobatic bird that can whiz across a whole summer sky in seconds. A swift is so equipped for speed that it can scarcely cope with being stationary.

I like the world we've got. If there is anything special and magical, I have to find it in the ordinary stuff.