Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
People die, but money never does.
You learn a lot, writing fiction.
I rather like getting away from fiction.
Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.
All history, of course, is the history of wars.
I didn't write anything until I was well over 30.
I didn't want it to be a book that made pronouncements.
We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.
Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.
We all act as hinges-fortuitous links between other people.
Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms.
I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.
We all need a past - that's where our sense of identity comes from.
If we had not met, that day, I think I would have imagined you somehow.
Mythology is much better stuff than history. It has form; logic; a message.
Deep down I have this atavistic feeling that really I should be in the country.
We read Greek and Norse mythology until it came out of our ears. And the Bible.
Wars are fought by children. Conceived by their mad demonic elders, and fought by boys.
I am addicted to arrivals, to those innocent dawn moments from which history accelerates.
Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are.
I'm now an agnostic but I grew up on the King James version, which I'm eternally grateful for.
History unravels; circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.
It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.
If people don't read, that's their choice; a lifelong book habit may itself be some sort of affliction.
I didn't think I had anything particular to say, but I thought I might have something to say to children.
There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history.
It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.
The consideration of change over the century is about loss, though I think that social change is gain rather than loss.
The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard.
There's a fearful term that's in fashion at the moment - closure. People apparently believe it is desirable and attainable.
I've always been fascinated by the operation of memory - the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence.
the days of our lives vanish utterly, more insubstantial than if they had been invented. Fiction can seem more enduring than reality.
Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present.
Grief-stricken. Stricken is right; it is as though you had been felled. Knocked to the ground; pitched out of life and into something else.
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.
The past is our ultimate privacy; we pile it up, year by year, decade by decade, it stows itself away, with its perverse random recall system.
Born in Jerusalem, Wadie Said went from being a dragoman to a salesman in the United States and thence to a hugely successful businessman in Egypt.
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.
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.
Giving presents is one of the most possessive things we do, did you realize that? It's the way we keep a hold on other people. Plant ourselves in their lives.
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.
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'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.
In old age, you realise that while you're divided from your youth by decades, you can close your eyes and summon it at will. As a writer it puts one at a distinct advantage.
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.
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.
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.
I have had to empty two family homes during the last few years - first, the house that had been my grandmothers since 1923, and then my own country home, which we had lived in for over twenty years.
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 can remember the lush spring excitement of language in childhood. Sitting in church, rolling it around my mouth like marbles--tabernacle and pharisee and parable, tresspass and Babylon and covenant.