The past beats inside me like a second heart.

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.

I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.

I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.

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

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.

I am the worst judge of my books.