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.

You have this comet trail of your own lived life, sparks from which arrive in the head all the time, whether you want them or not - life has been lived but it is still all going on, in the mind for better and for worse.

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

I didn't think I had anything particular to say, but I thought I might have something to say to children.

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

You learn a lot, writing fiction.

Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.