I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.

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

Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it.

If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.

Everything we do is tinged with the knowledge that this may be the last time that we will do this, and that makes what we're doing incredibly sweet.

I don't make a distinction between men and women. To me they are just people.

I'm a hopeless 19th-century romantic.