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

The Booker triumph of Graham Swift’s moving, effortlessly profound Last Orders is a vindication of the quiet, much-misunderstood path this fine writer chose to take after the brilliance of Waterland more than ten years ago.

The world is crawling with authors touring now. They’re like performance artists.

You say you’re sure? Sure that you’re in love? How can you know it? You think love is so simple?

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.

When the wrong people leave your life, the right things start to happen.

No one who is in business for profit can foist his or her beliefs on a workforce that includes many people who do not share those beliefs.

So don’t you worry your pretty little mind because people throw rocks at things that shine.

People are afraid of shadows. People are even more afraid of being in the shadow. But without a shadow, life will be two dimensional.

People think you’re crazy if you talk about things they don’t understand.

I am weird, you are weird. Everyone in this world is weird. One day two people come together in mutual weirdness and fall in love.

Please wear a mask. Covid is spreading quickly again and masks help keep people healthy and keep the country open.

I don’t know a perfect person. I only know flawed people who are still worth loving.