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" I think jogging is bad for your health. All that pressure on the knees and back cannot be good for you. "

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" This is the big question that we all have about our children: How much, how soon, do we tell our children the less comfortable facts about the world they're going to inherit? "

" To some extent, at least, you have to shield children from what you know and drip-feed information to them. Sometimes that is kindly meant, and sometimes not. "

" 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. "

" What is difficult is the promotion, balancing the public side of a writer's life with the writing. I think that's something a lot of writers are having to face. Writers have become much more public now. "

" I want my words to survive translation. I know when I write a book now I will have to go and spend three days being intensely interrogated by journalists in Denmark or wherever. That fact, I believe, informs the way I write - with those Danish journalists leaning over my shoulder. "

" There's something peculiar about writing fiction. It requires an interesting balance between seeing the world as a child and having the wisdom of a middle-aged person. The further you get from childhood and the experience of the teenage years, the greater the danger of losing that wellspring. "

" I don't have a deep link with England like, say, Jonathan Coe or Hanif Kureishi might demonstrate. For me, it is like a mythical place. "

" I had the sense when I looked back over my life I would actually see a mess of decisions, a few of which I had thought about, some of which I had sort of stumbled on and many that I had no control over whatsoever. "

" As a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened. "

" 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. "

" I couldn't speak Japanese very well, passport regulations were changing, I felt British, and my future was in Britain. And it would also make me eligible for literary awards. But I still think I'm regarded as one of their own in Japan. "

" Now when I look back to the Guildford of that time, it seems far more exotic to me than Nagasaki. "

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

" I'm very fortunate in that I don't have money problems. I have lunch with my wife at home. I don't have to commute, so I have much more time with my family. "

" I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened. "

" 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. "

" I started as a songwriter and wanted to be like Leonard Cohen. I've always seen my stories as enlarged songs. "

" Screenplays I didn't really care about, journalism, travel books, getting my writer friends to write about their dreams or something. I just determined to write the books I had to write. "

" I'm not at all interested in the brave who fight against the odds and win. I am interested in those who accept their lot, as that is what many people in the world are doing. They do their best in ghastly conditions. "

" I want my words to survive translation. "

" 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. "

" There's something very misleading about the literary culture that looks at writers in their 30s and calls them 'budding' or 'promising', when in fact they're peaking. "

" 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? "

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

" I discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me. "

" If you look at my last songs and first short stories, there is a real connection between them. "

" 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. "

" I spent ages figuring out things like viewpoint, how you tell the story, and so on. "

" I don't hang out with the glitteringly successful people; I hang out with people who've been friends for many years, and to some extent I feel my worldly success is a bit uncomfortable for them. "

" When I got to 40 or so... I had the sense when I looked back over my life I would actually see a mess of decisions, a few of which I had thought about, some of which I had sort of stumbled on, and many that I had no control over whatsoever. "