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

I had never liked, even feared a little, this wild reach of marsh and mud flats where everything seemed turned away from the land, looking off desperately toward the horizon as if in mute search for a sign of rescue.

...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left

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.

The secret of survival is a defective imagination.

In my books you have to concentrate, but I work hard to make it that, when you do, the rewards are quite high.

To take possession of a city of which you are not a native you must first fall in love there.