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

We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse: we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard.

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

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.

All I know for certain is that reading is of the most intense importance to me; if I were not able to read, to revisit old favorites and experiment with names new to me, I would be starved - probably too starved to go on writing myself.

I am addicted to arrivals, to those innocent dawn moments from which history accelerates.

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