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

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.

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.

Silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way.

You can love someone so much but you can never love people as much as you can miss them.

It’s not my place or Donald Trump’s place to declare who has won this election. That’s the decision of the American people.

It’s better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you’ll drift in that direction.

People cry not because they’re weak, it’s because they’ve been strong for too long.

The Russian people have their own cultural code, their own tradition.

Some people spend their lives interested only in themselves.

There’s always gonna be setbacks; there’s always gonna be knockdowns. There’s always gonna be people telling you, Hey, you suck!