She always wanted to believe in things.

Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers.

The problem, as I see it, is that you've been told and not told. You've been told, but none of you really understand, and I dare say, some people are quite happy to leave it that way.

I think there is a huge difference between writers who have very big sales, and writers who have small sales. Even writers with very high reputations, even Nobel prize winners, often sell in very low figures.

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.

I spent ages figuring out things like viewpoint, how you tell the story, and so on.

There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.