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.

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

I believe that the experience of childhood is irretrievable. All that remains, for any of us, is a headful of brilliant frozen moments, already dangerously distorted by the wisdoms of maturity.

The pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters; the novel is such a wonderfully flexible form.

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

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

Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms.