Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be.

After my parents passed away - in 2000 and 2003 - I felt I could take the time to think about the past and imagine what it would have been like to be my grandmother.

Even as a young child, I was a lover of books and of the spaces in which, as indeed in a sacred temple, books might safely reside.

The - the sort of thing that I want to do is to strike a resonant chord of universality in other people, which is best done by fiction.

I learned you don't discover the evidence of any cause in its result.

I can't imagine a mental life, a spiritual existence, not inextricably bound up with language of a formal, mediated nature. Telling stories, choosing an appropriate language with which to tell the story: This seems to me quintessentially human, one of the great adventures of our species.

If you're living with a scientist, you see the world differently than you do with a humanist. It's in some ways very subtle, the differences in perceiving reality.