“Love isn’t about when you first meet. It’s about the many, many years you spend together, when you’re trying to keep that flame burning.”

People aren’t quite sure what it means when a book is a Booker Prize winner. They’re not quite sure what is being recommended, what literary values it stands for, because every year it stands for something different.

Don’t you wonder sometimes, what might have happened if you tried?

I cannot start a story or chapter without knowing how it ends. Of course, it rarely ends that way.

I’ve always had a great fondness for English detective fiction such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.

I grew up in Britain before it became a multicultural place, so in many ways I have a nostalgia for an England that’s vanished – the England of my childhood has actually disappeared.

I want my words to survive translation.

Perhaps one day, all these conflicts will end, and it won’t be because of great statesmen or churches or organisations like this one. It’ll be because people have changed. They’ll be like you, Puffin. More a mixture. So why not become a mongrel? It’s healthy.

Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.

It had never occurred to me that our lives, which had been so closely interwoven, could unravel with such speed.

All children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma.

People were incredibly kind to our family and went out of their way to help.

Because maybe, in a way, we didn’t leave it behind nearly as much as we might once have thought. Because somewhere underneath, a part of us stayed like that: fearful of the world around us, and no matter how much we despised ourselves for it–unable quite to let each other go.

After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?

Typically in my novels the narrator tells a story by remembering, and the memories are colored by this and colored by that. So the whole universe of the novel tends to be framed by the narrator’s memories and thoughts.

As a writer, I’m more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.

There is certainly a satisfaction and dignity to be gained in coming to terms with the mistakes one has made in the course of one’s life.

I think my all time favourite song would be between ‘Slow Dancing in a Burning Room’ and ‘Dreaming with a Broken Heart’ by John Mayer.

While women were tortured, drowned and burned by the thousands, scarce one wizard to a hundred was ever condemned … The same distinction of sex appears in our own day. One code of morals for men, another for women.

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.

One remarkable fact stands out in the history of witchcraft; and that is, its victims were chiefly women. Scarce one wizard to a hundred witches was ever burned or tortured.

At present, Nations are burning. But, their leaders mistake the ash for snow.

For what I have publish’d, I can only hope to be pardon’d; but for what I have burned, I deserve to be prais’d.

He looks at me as if I’m the flame and he’s the sea; he’d turn his tide for a chance to burn with me.

Even in darkness, your light burns with the cosmic energy of a thousand falling stars.