Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.

One is not struck by the truth until prompted quite accidentally by some external event.

You need to remember that. If you’re to have decent lives, you have to know who you are and what lies ahead of you, every one of you.

I felt slightly superior to student politics, for instance. I had no reason to think this, but I thought of myself as slightly more seasoned. I became quite cynical talking to my student friends.

It was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you've made, and there's this panic because you don't know yet the scale of disaster you've left yourself open to.

Don’t you wonder sometimes, what might have happened if you tried?

There's still a part of me that thinks I have to write a really good novel. I'm not trying to say I'm not happy with the novels I've written in the past. But it always feels to me like there's another one that I have to write that will really say what I want to say, and really paint this world that I can see hazily in my head.