When you have committed enough words to paper, you feel you have a spine stiff enough to stand up in the wind. But when you stop writing, you find that's all you are - a spine, a row of rattling vertebrae, dried out like an old quill pen.

I only became a novelist because I thought I had missed my chance to become a historian.

Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths.

History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.

It is almost a joke, but a joke that nobody tells.

At New Year's he had given Anne a present of silver forks with handles of rock crystal. He hopes she will use them to eat with, not to stick in people.

I spend a lot of my time talking to the dead, but since I get paid for it, no one thinks I'm mad.