“I like the fact that by mimicking the way memory works, a writer can actually write in a fluid way – one solid scene doesn’t have to fall on another solid scene, you can just have a fragment that then dovetails into another one that took place 30 years apart from it.”

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 it’s quite difficult to understand what kind of life a writer leads. They might be millionaires, or they might be starving people.

Imagination, on the contrary, which is ever wandering beyond the bounds of truth, joined to self-love and that self-confidence we are so apt to indulge, prompt us to draw conclusions which are not immediately derived from facts.

The fact that everybody in the world dreams every night ties all mankind together.

Surely the fact that a uniformed police officer is wearing his hair below his collar will make him no less identifiable as a policeman.

Facts are true whether or not you believe them.

There is always a chance to get even and I’m proud of the fact that for all the blows I always got back up again. That’s what makes me most content.

Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids, in fact it’s cold as hell.

The errors which arise from the absence of facts are far more numerous and more durable than those which result from unsound reasoning respecting true data.

The language of experiment is more authoritative than any reasoning: facts can destroy our ratiocination—not vice versa.