I have the feeling of this completely alternative person I should have become. There was another life that I might have had, but I’m having this one.

Love isn't about when you first meet. It's about the many, many years you spend together, when you're trying to keep that flame burning.

The Booker triumph of Graham Swift's moving, effortlessly profound Last Orders is a vindication of the quiet, much-misunderstood path this fine writer chose to take after the brilliance of Waterland more than ten years ago.

Indeed — why should I not admit it? — in that moment, my heart was breaking.

Screenplays I didn't really care about, journalism, travel books, getting my writer friends to write about their dreams or something. I just determined to write the books I had to write.

But I really wanted to find it for you. And when it looked in the end like it wasn't going to turn up, I just said to myself, one day I'll go to Norfolk and I'll find it there for her.' 'The lost corner of England,' I said.

Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory.