If people don't read, that's their choice; a lifelong book habit may itself be some sort of affliction.

We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.

I didn't want it to be a book that made pronouncements.

Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.

I'm not a historian but I can get interested - obsessively interested - with any aspect of the past, whether it's palaeontology or archaeology or the very recent past.

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

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