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

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.

I did work out every day. I needed it to have the endurance to do what needed to be done and not get hurt. I have such a new respect for action stars now.

Many are needed to plant and water what has been planted now that the faith has spread so far and there are so many people... No matter who plants or waters, God gives no harvest unless what is planted is the faith of Peter and unless he agrees to his teachings.

It's funny, 'cause it seems like just yesterday that I was the youngest player just starting out. But now there are young players all over the league, and they'll ask me questions about playing overseas or finding an agent.

I want to have babies one day but not right now. When I do it I want to do it really well. I want it to be my best project in life.

I'm getting a wider circle of fans now. More women, more middle class people.

I am now convinced that theoretical physics is actually philosophy.

It is too maddening. I've got to fly off, right now, to some devilish navy yard, three hours in a seasick steamer, and after being heartily sick, I'll have to speak three times, and then I'll be sick coming home. Still, who would not be sick for England?

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.

The kinds of shows that seem to work now, the comedy shows, are those which require very little attention. They're superficial and I like articulate comedy.

I'm a more mature actress now.

Before and during the first phase of the war his administration repeatedly maligned the UN but now, that Iraq has turned into a quagmire, it is asking the UN for help.

They haul you up there for, you know, week after week in this kind of star chamber proceeding. Then at the end of it they say, well, we found nothing, but now it's time for special counsel.

I have in hands, now, specimens of bottom from t he Gulf Stream, obtained by Lieutenant Craven, and I can say that they are among the most interesting that I have ever seen.

From now on it is only through a conscious choice and through a deliberate policy that humanity can survive.

So I am one of those bass players who can do something and musically, it was back then and now it is even more, if you noticed on the new album, I am not playing all the time anymore.