What he wanted was not just to hear about Hailsham, but to remember Hailsham, just like it had been his own childhood. He knew he was close to completing and so that's what he was doing: getting me to describe things to him, so they'd really sink in, so that maybe during those sleepless nights, with the drugs and the paint and the exhaustion, the line would blur between what were my memories and what were his.

I had been plunged into a different world. I found myself spending half my time answering weird questions on book tours in the Midwest. People would stand up and explain to me the situation in their office and ask me whether they should resign or not.

Many of our deepest motives come, not from an adult logic of how things work in the world, but out of something that is frozen from childhood.

What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint.

If you are under the impression you have already perfected yourself, you will never rise to the heights you are no doubt capable of.

I think it's quite difficult to understand what kind of life a writer leads. They might be millionaires, or they might be starving people.

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.