“[talking about the Holocaust] ‘But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained.”

Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?

It’s like going to a place that you’ve never been to before – you’ve got a picture of it and then you go there and that picture is totally wiped out by the reality.

You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated.

The majority of people perform well in a crisis and when the spotlight is on them; it’s on the Sunday afternoons of this life, when nobody is looking, that the spirit falters.

You have the knowledge but that does not entitle you to be superior. Knowledge makes you the servant not the master.

But then, when I did go, the contrast between Leeds, which was very black and sooty in those days, and Cambridge, which seemed like something out of a fairystory, in the grip of a hard frost, was just wonderful.

Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.

Our father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages – just don’t catch him at breakfast.

My films are about embarrassment.

His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls.

Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.

A book is a device to ignite the imagination.

So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.

I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?

Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.

If I had to sum up my work, I suppose that’s it really: I’m taking the pith out of reality.

The thing that interests me far more than anything is creating music, songwriting and arranging, and in that context drumming itself is a means to an end.

I have a 6-year-old, and his thing is to turn on Radio Disney in the car, and I get such an allergic reaction to listening to that music and the context into which it falls. I’m really working on him about that.

This means trying to bring values into environments, buildings, and contexts that improve the quality of life for future generations.

And often times it gets manipulated, sometimes intentionally, by pulling things out of context.

You have to be malleable to what’s going to work, and you have to stay in the framework of the context.

Some critics have commented that understanding the specific Brazilian political context of the novel is helpful for reading Quiet Creature. This may be true, but it’s not prerequisite for understanding it.

I don’t like the word “experiment” in the context of art in general. It implies something immature, unfinished, something entertaining for a moment before it becomes irrelevant.

These are two people who would never have overlapped in any other way or context.