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" I'm a hopeless 19th-century romantic. "

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" I've been wrestling with Kafka since I was an adolescent. I think he's a great aphorist, a great letter writer, a great diarist, a great short story writer, and a great novelist - I'd put novelist last. "

" It's great people still care about books, and it's great you can still fashion a life from literature. "

" For memory, we use our imagination. We take a few strands of real time and carry them with us, then like an oyster we create a pearl around them. "

" Death is such a strange thing. One minute you're here and then just gone. You'd think there would be an anteroom, a place where you could be visited before you go. "

" Writers are just like other people, except slightly more obsessed. "

" I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get. "

" Doing what you do well is death. Your duty is to keep trying to do things that you don't do well, in the hope of learning. "

" Why does the past seem so magical, so fraught, so luminous? At the time it was just, ugh, another boring bloody day. But, to look back on, it's a day full of miracles and light and extraordinary events. Why is this? What process do we apply to the past, to give it this vividness? I don't know. "

" I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects. "

" When I started writing, I was a great rationalist and believed I was absolutely in control. But the older one gets, the more confused, and for an artist I think that is quite a good thing: you allow in more of your instinctual self; your dreams, fantasies and memories. It's richer, in a way. "

" I don't know if there is a personal identity. We all imagine that we are absolute individuals. But when we begin to look for where this individuality resides, it's very difficult to find. "

" With the crime novels, it's delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. It's like having a fictitious family. "

" With crime fiction, you have to write a half-dozen before they catch on. "

" I read Nietzsche when I was a teenager and then I went back to reading him when I was in my thirties, and his voice spoke directly to me. Nietzsche is such a superb literary artist. "

" I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant. "

" I sometimes think that I might be slightly autistic. There might be a syndrome that hasn't been named. I don't seem to see the world in the same way that most people I know see it. They don't seem to be baffled by it. "

" I know some of my memories are made up and they are far more powerful than the things that actually happened. For example, I always remember my brother posting me a copy of 'Dubliners' from Africa, but he says he never did. "

" I'd given up Catholicism in my teens but something of it stays with me. I try to create the perfect sentence - that's as close to godliness as I can get. "

" When I say I don't like my own work, that doesn't mean it isn't better than everyone else's. "

" How I envy writers who can work on aeroplanes or in hotel rooms. On the run I can produce an article or a book review, or even a film script, but for fiction I must have my own desk, my own wall with my own postcards pinned to it, and my own window not to look out of. "

" We writers are shy, nocturnal creatures. Push us into the light and the light blinds us. "

" We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past. "

" When you're writing there's a deep, deep level of concentration way below your normal self. This strange voice, these strange sentences come out of you. "

" I suppose it's possible that a writer would have feeling for his characters, but I can't see how, because writing is such a meticulous, intricate, technical business. I wish I could say that I love my characters and that frequently they take over the book and run away with the plot and so on. But they don't exist. "