“I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they’d once belonged to the sea.”

The world is crawling with authors touring now. They’re like performance artists.

You say you’re sure? Sure that you’re in love? How can you know it? You think love is so simple?

I don’t think it’s any fun, even if you are one of the most respected authors in the world like Margaret Atwood, to keep being nominated and not win.

I discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me.

Sometimes I get so immersed in my own company, if I unexpectedly run into someone I know, it’s a bit of a shock and takes me a while to adjust.

There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.

But then, I suppose, when with the benefit of hindsight one begins to search one’s past for such ‘turning points’, one is apt to start seeing them everywhere.

And I’m a Hailsham student – which is enough by itself sometimes to get people’s backs up.

There comes a point when you can more or less count the number of books you’re going to write before you die.

Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers.

She always wanted to believe in things.

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.

What is pertinent is the calmness of beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as though the land knows of its own beauty, its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it.

Indeed — why should I not admit it? — in that moment, my heart was breaking.

There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.

Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory.

One of the first things taught in introductory statistics textbooks is that correlation is not causation. It is also one of the first things forgotten.

I was with book, as a woman is with child

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.

I feel like it’s impossible to please the hardcore comic book fans, because they’ll never be happy no matter what you do.

Reading can take you places you have never been before.

Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.

Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else.

Most people who travel look only at what they are directed to look at. Great is the power of the guidebook maker, however ignorant.