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

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" 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'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. "

" I don't see how English as we use it in Europe can be revivified. It's like Latin must have been in about A.D. 300, tired and used up. All one can do is press very hard stylistically to make it glow. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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'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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "