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

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

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

I'm intrigued by the way in which physical appearance can often direct a person's life; things happen differently for a beautiful woman than for a plain one.

Deep down I have this atavistic feeling that really I should be in the country.

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

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

I have long been interested in landscape history, and when younger and more robust I used to do much tramping of the English landscape in search of ancient field systems, drove roads, indications of prehistoric settlement.

Since then, I have just read and read - but, that said, I suppose there is a raft of writers to whom I return again and again, not so much because I want to write like them, even if I were capable of it, but simply for a sort of stylistic shot in the arm.

We read Greek and Norse mythology until it came out of our ears. And the Bible.

I didn't write anything until I was well over 30.

I'm now an agnostic but I grew up on the King James version, which I'm eternally grateful for.

I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.

It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.

You learn a lot, writing fiction.

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

We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.

Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are.

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

It was a combination of an intense interest in children's literature, which I've always had, and the feeling that I'd just have a go and see if I could do it.

We all need a past - that's where our sense of identity comes from.

Conventional forms of narrative allow for different points of view, but for this book I wanted a structure whereby each of the main characters contributed a distinctive version of the story.

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.

There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history.

I'm not an historian and I'm not wanting to write about how I perceive the social change over the century as a historian, but as somebody who's walked through it and whose life has been dictated by it too, as all our lives are.

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.

The present hardly exists, after all-it becomes the past even as it happens. A tricky medium, time - and central to the concerns of fiction.

I have had to empty two family homes during the last few years - first, the house that had been my grandmother's since 1923, and then my own country home, which we had lived in for over twenty years.

I rather like getting away from fiction.

I'm not an 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.

Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present.

All I know for certain is that reading is of the most intense importance to me; if I were not able to read, to revisit old favorites and experiment with names new to me, I would be starved - probably too starved to go on writing myself.

The consideration of change over the century is about loss, though I think that social change is gain rather than loss.

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

No player can become accustomed to New York's climate in August in a few days. The playing conditions, the courts in New York and France are very different.

A slight daily unconscious luxury is hardly ever wanting to the dwellers in civilization; like the gentle air of a genial climate, it is a perpetual minute enjoyment.

In fact, even the current administration now is releasing recent reports indicating that climate change is real, that global warming is occurring, that it is heavily influenced by man-made objects and that it is something we cannot ignore any longer.

As somebody who's been writing about this subject for getting on twenty years now, it's astonishing how the climate has changed in the last five years.

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

Manners are love in a cool climate.

Computer modelling for weather forecasting, and indeed for climate forecasting, has reached its limits.

Nevada once again has shown double digit increases in tax revenue... Nevada continues to show economic stability with its desirable business climate and booming tourism sector.

The human organism inherits so delicate an adjustment to climate that, in spite of man's boasted ability to live anywhere, the strain of the frozen North eliminates the more nervous and active types of mind.

Indeed, in the present climate of mistrust of institutions, many people who yearn for a more meaningful and fulfilling life would regard the church as an unlikely place to go for guidance.

Well, if you're talking about the current climate, there's a lack of content in American film because I think people are deeply confused about their emotions, and they don't regret certain aspects of their own foreign policy.

The first issue of The Register was printed in London, and gave a glowing account of the province that was to be - its climate, its resources, the sound principles on which it was founded.

At a time when U.S. jobs are heading overseas at a record pace, and amidst increased sanctions on our manufacturers and producers from other countries, it's imperative that we do all we can to provide our businesses a climate to operate successfully.

I was afterwards sorry for this, though, if I ever travel again, I shall trust to none but natives, as the climate of Africa is too trying to foreigners.

If we're going to create the best business climate to create higher paying jobs and retain our young people, we're going to have to build a workforce prepared for the opportunities of the future.