The religion I know most about, which is the Christian one, would simply say that it’s not really for one man or woman to know fully and to understand the nature of our brief human...

I know. I was there. I saw the great void in your soul, and you saw mine.

If I could eat only one thing for the rest of my life, it would be rhubarb fool, which I make with ginger and a hint of elderflower cordial.

My own diagnosis of my problem is a simpler one. It’s that I share 50 per cent of my genome with a banana and 98 per cent with a chimpanzee. Banana’s don’t do psychological consistency....

I have a tremendous battle with melancholy and depression.

One thing about London is that when you step out into the night, it swallows you.

Why would a novel – which is all about the inward processes of people’s developing feelings and developing relationships – why would you be able to portray that in pictures with as few words as...

And in that history you’re trying to connect to something that once was yours – to something purer, better, something that you lost or something, maybe, that you never knew but that you feel you...

I believe your stomach tells you what it wants, and I don’t think mine asks for anything that unhealthy. I’m a trained health machine.

Depression – that limp word for the storm of black panic and half-demented malfunction – had over the years worked itself out in Charlotte’s life in a curious pattern. Its onset was often imperceptible: like...

What I like in novels that I read and enjoy is interplay of theme: the mystery of how we seem to be so separate as human beings.

And sometimes in life, I imagine, good things do happen. Most of the time, it’s the opposite, obviously. But I don’t think you should rule out the possibility that just occasionally chance might deal you...

One of the hardest things about being alive is being with other people.

We’re deaf men working as musicians; we play the music but we can’t hear it.

The nicest characters in ‘A Week in December’ are, in fact, Muslims – and their religious devotion is one of the things that defines them.

All my life I had lived on the presumption that there was no existence beyond… flesh, the moment of being alive… then nothing. I had searched in superstition… But there was nothing. Then I heard...

I want to write about serious things, but I want to write about them in a way that makes them accessible to a large number of people – to take them through the argument by...

I want to be careful not to throw all this away. This is happiness. I think this is what happiness is. I haven’t got it yet, but I can sense it out there. I feel...

I am a romantic, in a literary way, by which I mean the Romantic poets, who thought just because a sensation is fleeting doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable. If the only criterion of value is...

Gradually the feeling wears off, and I feel swamped again by the inexplicable pettiness of being alive.

A bit of the vagueness of music stops you going completely mad, I imagine.

I’ve found contemporary Britain difficult to write about because it seems to me to have lacked gravity or grandeur. This is some cultural problem which I don’t really understand. It simply isn’t the same in...