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

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" I wouldn't want to try to adapt something of my own. It would be like going back to school and doing all my exams again. "

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

" I work very regular hours, roughly 9 to 5:30. I think I have it much easier than a lot of parents. I just sit at home, I have a very flexible timetable, and 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. "

" Our family arrived in England in 1960. At that time I thought the war was ancient history. But if I think of 15 years ago from now, that's 1990, and that seems like yesterday to me. "

" There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one. "

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

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

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

" 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'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. "

" 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 interests me is the surprising enormous extent to which most people accept the fate that's been given to them, and find some dignity. "

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

" I want my words to survive translation. "

" 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. "

" We always like to keep our children in a kind of bubble and censor the bad news about the world. We like to tell them the world is full of benevolent, nice people. "

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

" 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. "

" 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? "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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 loved cowboy films and TV series, and I learned bits of English from them. My favorite was 'Laramie', with Robert Fuller and John Smith. I used to watch 'The Lone Ranger', which had been famous in Japan as well. I idolized these cowboys. "

" I do feel part of that generation of people who were rather idealistic in the '70s and became disillusioned in the '80s. Not just about social services issues, but the world. "

" There's a practical problem about time and energy, and a more subtle problem of what it does to a writer's head, to continually analyze why they write, where it all comes from, where it's going to. "

" 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. "

" Why would somebody just read a novel when they can see it on TV or in the cinema? 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'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. "