We all need a past - that's where our sense of identity comes from.

I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.

I didn't want it to be a book that made pronouncements.

I'm intrigued by the way in which physical appearance can often direct a person's life; things happen differently for a beautiful woman than for a plain one.

Deep down I have this atavistic feeling that really I should be in the country.

Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.

The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard.

I have long been interested in landscape history, and when younger and more robust I used to do much tramping of the English landscape in search of ancient field systems, drove roads, indications of prehistoric settlement.

Since then, I have just read and read - but, that said, I suppose there is a raft of writers to whom I return again and again, not so much because I want to write like them, even if I were capable of it, but simply for a sort of stylistic shot in the arm.

We read Greek and Norse mythology until it came out of our ears. And the Bible.

I didn't write anything until I was well over 30.

I'm now an agnostic but I grew up on the King James version, which I'm eternally grateful for.

I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.

It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.

You learn a lot, writing fiction.

I've always been fascinated by the operation of memory - the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence.

We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.

Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are.

I didn't think I had anything particular to say, but I thought I might have something to say to children.

It was a combination of an intense interest in children's literature, which I've always had, and the feeling that I'd just have a go and see if I could do it.

We all need a past - that's where our sense of identity comes from.

Conventional forms of narrative allow for different points of view, but for this book I wanted a structure whereby each of the main characters contributed a distinctive version of the story.

The pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters; the novel is such a wonderfully flexible form.

There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history.

I'm not an historian and I'm not wanting to write about how I perceive the social change over the century as a historian, but as somebody who's walked through it and whose life has been dictated by it too, as all our lives are.

I can walk about London and see a society that seems an absolutely revolutionary change from the 1950s, that seems completely and utterly different, and then I can pick up on something where you suddenly see that it's not.

The present hardly exists, after all-it becomes the past even as it happens. A tricky medium, time - and central to the concerns of fiction.

I have had to empty two family homes during the last few years - first, the house that had been my grandmother's since 1923, and then my own country home, which we had lived in for over twenty years.

I rather like getting away from fiction.

I'm not an historian but I can get interested - obsessively interested - with any aspect of the past, whether it's palaeontology or archaeology or the very recent past.

Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present.

All I know for certain is that reading is of the most intense importance to me; if I were not able to read, to revisit old favorites and experiment with names new to me, I would be starved - probably too starved to go on writing myself.

The consideration of change over the century is about loss, though I think that social change is gain rather than loss.

Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.

I grew up with art from the innocent age of ten - with art, but with no sense of identity.

When you break up, your whole identity is shattered. It's like death.

MSNBC got some very good people. They've got a good-looking set. All They're first-class. Somewhere along the way, they kind of lost their identity as a news channel, and they started doing a lot of other sort of magazine-type programming.

I knew an actor's career goes up and down and back up again. Your standing in this business can't be your whole identity; otherwise, you're doomed.

Narrative identity takes part in the story's movement, in the dialectic between order and disorder.

As I look back over my life, before I had any real identity, I was a traveler. I grew up an Army brat, a runaway, an activist, and a musician. All my life I've been traveling.

Vietnamese must be made to feel that they are racial inferiors with no right to national identity.

Every piece has its own identity which we develop by the rule 'We know no limits.' We follow the inspiration of the moment and don't worry if what we're playing is alternative, progressive or fusion rock.

We say we want to create beauty, identity, quality, singularity. And yet, maybe in truth these cities that we have are desired. Maybe their very characterlessness provides the best context for living.

As problems like identity theft become more prevalent, now more than ever, Americans need to take their financial health seriously - and this information is of the utmost importance.

Identity theft involving these cards is a growing form of white collar crime, facilitating illegal immigration, banking and accounting fraud, tax evasion, and other nefarious activities.

Against the dark background of this contemporary civilization of well-being, even the arts tend to mingle, to lose their identity.

After that I couldn't show my face outside. I lost my identity and balance. I was still living with my parents, and they were my only friends. For so many people, this thing with the nurse was confirmation that I must be mad or mentally ill.

When you're in a band that's so big when you're young, you kind of lose your identity a little bit. You just become part of the band. I just needed to get away from it.

From the equality of rights springs identity of our highest interests; you cannot subvert your neighbor's rights without striking a dangerous blow at your own.