You can't have a novel without real, believable people, and once you get into either too theoretical a novel or too philosophical a novel, you get into the dangers that the French novel has discovered in the past 50 or 60 years. And you get into a sort of aridity. No, you have to have real, identifiable people to whom the reader reacts in a way as if they were real people.

Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.

History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.

Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.

People in love, it is well known, suffer extreme conceptual delusions, the most common of these being that other people find your condition as thrilling and eye-watering as you do yourselves.

In life, every ending is just the start of another story.

I was initially planning to write about grief in terms of Eurydice and the myth thereof. By that point the overall metaphor of height and depth and flat and falling and rising was coming into being in my mind.