“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.”

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 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.

Stars fade away in the morning, but your beauty still remains evident. Perhaps stars envy you.

When you leave a place, your sillage would fade but your vibes stay.

It’s better to burn out than to fade away.

Your smile stuck in my soul but your touch has faded away.

Our lives are like the wind or like sounds. We come into being, resonate with each other. Then fade away.

A life lived in love will never be dull.

Love can never grow old. Locks may lose their brown and gold. Cheeks may fade and hollow grow. But the hearts that love will know, never winter’s frost and chill, summer’s warmth is in them still.

I mean the flesh, never fade! The flesh never leave the creation, see, because with that divine spirit the flesh cannot fade. If the spirit is weak then the flesh fade, seen?