the days of our lives vanish utterly, more insubstantial than if they had been invented. Fiction can seem more enduring than reality.

It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.

I believe that the experience of childhood is irretrievable. All that remains, for any of us, is a headful of brilliant frozen moments, already dangerously distorted by the wisdoms of maturity.

It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.

I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.

The present hardly exists, after all-it becomes the past even as it happens. A tricky medium, time - and central to the concerns of fiction.

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