“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.”

An artist’s concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.

You need to remember that. If you’re to have decent lives, you have to know who you are and what lies ahead of you, every one of you.

When you become a parent, or a teacher, you turn into a manager of this whole system. You become the person controlling the bubble of innocence around a child, regulating it.

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.

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.

Our association is powerful: it can uplift us or bring us down.

This world is a bitter tree, it has only two sweet nectar like fruits – one is soft voice and the other is company of gentlemen.

The shortest way to get anywhere is to have good company.

I am looking forward to going to Dubai because it gives us an opportunity to interact with each other. We can sit and enjoy each other’s company. We can go out for a walk without worrying about shooting schedules.

A man or a woman is known by the company they keep.

When you wait in the admired company of he that created it.

It’s a little different when you spend 30 years developing all these companies that we just ask [Donald Trump] to sell them. So I don’t think that’s a fair request.

People change and even products change. But over the course of time it’s the strength of a company’s philosophy that will determine whether or not it endures.