I dont know if there is a personal identity. We all imagine that we are absolute individuals. But when we begin to look for where this individuality resides, its very difficult to find.

The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.

All I wanted was to be left alone. They abhor a vacuum, other people. You find a quiet corner where you can hunker down in peace, and the next minute there they are, crowding around you in their party hats, tooting their paper whistles in your face and insisting you get up and join in the knees-up.

With the crime novels, its delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. Its like having a fictitious family.

You will remember this when all else fades, this moment, here, together, by this well. There will be certain days, and certain nights, you’ll feel my presence near you, hear my voice. You’ll think you have imagined it and yet, inside you, you will catch an answering cry. On April evenings, when the rain has ceased, your heart will shake, you’ll weep for nothing, pine for what’s not there. For you, this life will never be enough, there will forever be an emptiness, where once the god was all in all in you.

I dont know if there is a personal identity. We all imagine that we are absolute individuals. But when we begin to look for where this individuality resides, its very difficult to find.

What I was afraid of was my own grief, the weight of it, the ineluctable corrosive force of it, and the stark awareness I had of being, for the first time in my life, entirely alone, a Crusoe shipwrecked and stranded in the limitless wastes of a boundless and indifferent ocean.