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

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

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.

I really have to think of the things fiction can do that film can’t and play to the strengths of the novel. With a novel you can get right inside somebody’s head.

I think there is a huge difference between writers who have very big sales, and writers who have small sales. Even writers with very high reputations, even Nobel prize winners, often sell in very low figures.

My friends and I took songwriting very, very seriously. My hero was and still is Bob Dylan, but also people like Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell and that whole generation.

There are things I am more interested in than the clone thing. How are they trying to find their place in the world and make sense of their lives? To what extent can they transcend their fate? As time starts to run out, what are the things that really matter?

We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all.

I read one psychologist’s theory that said, “Never strike a child in your anger.” When could I strike him? When he is kissing me on my birthday? When he’s recuperating from measles? Do I slap the Bible out of his hand on Sunday?

I love Madrid. I am happy to be here. I have been here three years and hope to be here longer. But I am proud of where I come from and never forget the people I grew up with.

When I was 20 or 21, I didn’t… I won’t say care about anything, but you’re like in your own world – you made something that you always wanted to do, and then you kind of think only about your family and yourself.

I was lucky to come from a difficult area. It teaches you not just about football but also life. There were lots of kids from different races and poor families. People had to struggle to get through the day.

My daughter and I are very close, we speak every single day and I call her every day and I say the same thing, “pick up, I know you’re there.”

As my Sicilian grandfather used to say, you get more flies with honey than with vinegar, right?

My father is an Algerian, proud of who he is and I am proud that my father is Algerian.

I’ve been screaming at the top of my lungs at my family, ‘Work out! Work out! Old age is coming!’