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

Mythology is much better stuff than history. It has form; logic; a message.

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

Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.

The place didn't look the same but it felt the same; sensations clutched and transformed me. I stood outside some concrete and plate-glass tower-block, picked a handful of eucalyptus leaves from a branch, crushed them in my hand, smelt, and tears came to my eyes. Sixty-seven-year-old Claudia, on a pavement awash with packaged American matrons, crying not in grief but in wonder that nothing is ever lost, that everything can be retrieved, that a lifetime is not linear but instant. That, inside the head, everything happens at once.

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

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.