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

I can walk about London and see a society that seems an absolutely revolutionary change from the 1950s, that seems completely and utterly different, and then I can pick up on something where you suddenly see that it's not.

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

I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.

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

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.

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.