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.

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.

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.

Although Alchemy has now fallen into contempt, and is even considered a thing of the past, the physicain should not be influenced by such judgements.

I do like to drive fast and I have gotten pulled over in the past. I use my skills to get out of tickets.

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past - whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

The best prophet of the future is the past.

Some of the best lessons we ever learn are learned from past mistakes. The error of the past is the wisdom and success of the future.

Philosophy finds it an easy matter to vanquish past and future evils, but the present are commonly too hard for it.

Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present.

You can also make explicit certain social problems which, again, would be prejudged or not encountered at all in real life, because people have set up defenses against it. Fantasy allows you to get past defenses.

America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.

Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.

Terrorism, ladies and gentlemen, in my eyes I have a very, very, very simple explanation. Gangs of criminals, killers, used unfortunately by certain governments in the past for political purposes, who are on their own now as gangs.

In the past 3-4 years I've developed a habit of keeping numerous small cassette recorders in my house and in a bag with me so that I'm able to commit to tape memory song ideas on a constant basis.

By this time it was past six, and the enemy's van and ours were at too great a distance to engage, I perceived some of their ships stretching to the northward; and I imagined they were going to form a new line.

Firms would be given initial entitlements to gross markup on the basis of past performance. These entitlements would be transferable and a market in them would be developed.