The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard.

If we had not met, that day, I think I would have imagined you somehow.

There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history.

The day is refracted, and the next and the one after that, all of them broken up into a hundred juggled segments, each brilliant and self-contained so that the hours are no longer linear but assorted like bright sweets in a jar.

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.

The past is our ultimate privacy; we pile it up, year by year, decade by decade, it stows itself away, with its perverse random recall system.

I didn't write anything until I was well over 30.