“You have to accept that sometimes that’s how things happen in this world. People’s opinions, their feelings, they go one way, then the other. It just so happens you grew up at a certain point in this process.”

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.

I have the feeling of this completely alternative person I should have become. There was another life that I might have had, but I’m having this one.

We all live inside bodies that will deteriorate. But when you look at human beings, they’re capable of very decent things: love, loyalty. When time is running out, they don’t care about possessions or status. They want to put things right if they’ve done wrong.

It is one of the enjoyments of retirement that you are able to drift through the day at your own pace, easy in the knowledge that you have put hard work and achievement behind you.

I was a little concerned that a lot of people thought I wrote Merchant Ivory movies. I also thought if I was ever going to write something strange and difficult, that was the time.

The evening’s the best part of the day. You’ve done your day’s work. Now you can put your feet up and enjoy it.

One is not struck by the truth until prompted quite accidentally by some external event.

It was strange how your brain could know what your heart refused to accept.

My greatest victory has been to be able to live with myself, to accept my shortcomings. I’m a long way from the human being I’d liked to be, but I’ve decided I’m not so bad after all.

Those who know the truth are not equal to those who love it.

Death comes for us all in the end.

I was willing to accept what I couldn’t change.

If you accept the expectations of others, especially negative ones, then you never will change the outcome.

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

If I accept the sunshine and warmth, then I must also accept the thunder and lightning.