I'm intrigued by the way in which physical appearance can often direct a person's life; things happen differently for a beautiful woman than for a plain one.

Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms.

I've always been fascinated by the operation of memory - the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence.

The consideration of change over the century is about loss, though I think that social change is gain rather than loss.

We all need a past - that's where our sense of identity comes from.

Grief-stricken. Stricken is right; it is as though you had been felled. Knocked to the ground; pitched out of life and into something else.

I didn't want it to be a book that made pronouncements.