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

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.

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.

Love isn’t about when you first meet. It’s about the many, many years you spend together, when you’re trying to keep that flame burning.

I started as a songwriter and wanted to be like Leonard Cohen. I’ve always seen my stories as enlarged songs.

I try to always go for something very interior, following thoughts and memories, something that I think is difficult to do on the screen, which is essentially a third-person medium.

And if these incidents now seem full of significance and all of a piece, it’s probably because I’m looking at them in the light of what came later.

Books have always been important to me – my mom was a first grade teacher, so I grew up reading all the time.

Life is a book that never ends. Chapters close, but not the book itself. The end of one physical incarnation is like the end of a chapter, on some level setting up the beginning of another.

Half of my mum’s family is Welsh. I remember when I was a kid she used to read to me, and witches and wizards in books always had a Welsh accent, so I guess I took it from that really.

Whatever you read, read the Bible first. Beware of bad books: there are plenty in this day. Take heed what you read.

This time, there have been a lot of interesting discussions about the subject matter, and I’ve had a good time talking about it. And in some of the cases, I’m not just signing books – I’m showing slides and talking about the work

I do not read a book; I hold a conversation with the author.

Take away the cross of Christ, and the Bible is a dark book.

I was quite a weird kid because I didn’t like getting presents. I don’t know why. I just went for books all the time.