“I want my words to survive translation.”

I felt slightly superior to student politics, for instance. I had no reason to think this, but I thought of myself as slightly more seasoned. I became quite cynical talking to my student friends.

I think I had actually served my apprenticeship as a writer of fiction by writing all those songs. I had already been through phases of autobiographical or experimental stuff.

Many of our deepest motives come, not from an adult logic of how things work in the world, but out of something that is frozen from childhood.

People aren’t quite sure what it means when a book is a Booker Prize winner. They’re not quite sure what is being recommended, what literary values it stands for, because every year it stands for something different.

Don’t you wonder sometimes, what might have happened if you tried?

I cannot start a story or chapter without knowing how it ends. Of course, it rarely ends that way.

I’ve always had a great fondness for English detective fiction such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.

I grew up in Britain before it became a multicultural place, so in many ways I have a nostalgia for an England that’s vanished – the England of my childhood has actually disappeared.

Perhaps one day, all these conflicts will end, and it won’t be because of great statesmen or churches or organisations like this one. It’ll be because people have changed. They’ll be like you, Puffin. More a mixture. So why not become a mongrel? It’s healthy.

Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.

It had never occurred to me that our lives, which had been so closely interwoven, could unravel with such speed.

All children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma.

People were incredibly kind to our family and went out of their way to help.

Because maybe, in a way, we didn’t leave it behind nearly as much as we might once have thought. Because somewhere underneath, a part of us stayed like that: fearful of the world around us, and no matter how much we despised ourselves for it–unable quite to let each other go.

After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?

Typically in my novels the narrator tells a story by remembering, and the memories are colored by this and colored by that. So the whole universe of the novel tends to be framed by the narrator’s memories and thoughts.

Now that I’m an adult, I realize that kids know at a very young age when they’re being devalued, when adults aren’t invested enough to help them learn. Their anger over it can manifest itself as unruliness. It’s hardly their fault. They aren’t bad kids. They’re just trying to survive bad circumstances.

Through humor, you can soften some of the worst blows that life delivers. And once you find laughter, no matter how painful your situation might be, you can survive it.

You can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can find humor in anything, even poverty, you can survive it.

The only thing I asked for now was to be alive tomorrow morning and to survive another day. That was all that mattered.

Love is the only engine of survival.

We need 4 hugs a day for survival. We need 8 hugs a day for maintenance. We need 12 hugs a day for growth.

I survived because the fire I have inside me burns brighter than the fire that surrounds me forever thriving with blazing vitality.

Evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.