The best years are when you know what you're doing.

The world is a sea in which we all must surely drown.

In 'The Plato Papers' I wanted to get another perspective on the present moment by extrapolating into the distant future. So in that sense, there's a definite similarity of purpose between a book set in the future and a book set in the past.

I just wanted to be an ordinary, middle-class person. When I was at Cambridge I made great efforts to lose the last remnants of my cockney accent.

The ordinary routines of life are never chronicled by the historian, but they make up almost the whole of experience.

I don't know if I have a voice of my own. I don't see me being an important person with something to say. I haven't. I've got nothing to say. My opinion is of no consequence or value.

I am in the Pitte, but I have gone so deep that I can see the brightness of the Starres at Noon.