Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are.

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

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

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.

History unravels; circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.

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

All history, of course, is the history of wars.