You stand beneath the arthritic boughs of any English oak, and you survey a thousand tales.
Jim Crace
There is no reason why the Louvre should be your favourite gallery just because it has the grandest collections in France, any more than Kew should necessarily be a favourite garden because it has the largest assemblage of plants, or Tesco your chosen shop because it has the widest variety of canned beans.
I was brought up in a flat in North London - virtually the last building in London, because north of us was countryside all the way to the coast, and south of us was non-stop London for 20 miles.
Retiring from writing is to avoid the inevitable bitterness which a writing career is bound to deliver as its end product in almost every case.
Sixteen years as a freelance features journalist taught me that neither the absence of 'the Muse' nor the presence of 'the block' should be allowed to hinder the orderly progress of a book.
For 'The Gift of Stones,' I spent an afternoon chasing a flock of Canadian geese.
Even though the method of 'Harvest' was a historical novel, its intentions were that of a modern novel. I'm asking you to think about land being seized in Brazil by soya barons. It's also a novel about immigration.
My dad didn't have a formal education, but he had a wonderful vocabulary. So in 'Harvest,' I wanted my main character to be an innately intelligent man who would have the vocabulary to say whatever he wanted in the same way as lots of working-class people can.
I have tested my nerve by reaching a little too closely toward a lengthy alligator on the Gulf Coast and a saucer-sized tarantula in a Houston car park.
I don't have a constituency, and I'm not autobiographical in any way. I write these deeply moral books in a country which would prefer irony to anything with a moral tone.
Privately, I'm thrilled with what I do, but publicly, I hold it in disdain.
If I talk about my father's funeral, as I did when I was promoting the last novel, 'Being Dead,' I'm not going to tell any lies, but there are certain things I'm not going to tell you, and I'm certainly not going to tell my grief.
For all the splendours of the world's greatest galleries, visitors are likely to be kept at arm's length, spectators of a world that can seem too rarefied to let them in.
Storytelling enables us to play out decisions before we make them, to plan routes before we take them, to work out the campaign before we start the war, to rehearse the phrases we're going to use to please or placate our wives and husbands.
The most I have to fear while hiking in Warwickshire and Worcestershire, the two historic British counties closest to my city home in Birmingham, is whether or not the mud awaiting me in the narrow lanes ahead is deep enough to foul my socks.
When I was a youngster, I was brought up in a very political background on an estate in north London.
I should have been kinder when I was younger.
I know the money is important, but, actually, the validation of your career that prizes give is what you really want. But the money is fabulous, too.
I stopped being an engaged journalist and became a disengaged novelist.
Almost everyone who's been to primary school in Britain has had towels put on their heads to play the shepherds in the nativity play.
Narrative has been part of human consciousness for a long time. And if it has played a part in all those thousands of years, it will know a trick or two. It will be wise. It will be mischievous. It will be helpful. It will be generous.
I have in the past acquired a reputation for concocting non-existent writers and unwritten volumes.
I want to live in a city where the future is being mapped out.
I've got a big, long list of stuff you're entitled to hate about my books.
I offer detailed but mostly invented narratives about the provenance of my books.
I invent words you think you've heard - spray hopper or swag beetle.
I'd dearly love to write a political book that changed the hearts and minds of men and women.
The celebrity sense of writers is something which is very tempting... But the enthusiasm comes from the fact that it's such a natural activity, storytelling.
I didn't go to university straight after school. I went at night.
Good old-fashioned, puritanical work guilt is, for me, a better colleague than any Muse. If I reach my weekly word target by Friday afternoon, then the weekend is guilt-free.
When people asked me what I did, I'd say, 'I work in publishing', and when they then say, 'What side of it?', I say, 'Supply' - no doubt leaving them to think I drive the books around in a van and deliver them.
In the U.K., a lot of writers won't show up to support activist issues because they figure they're already repairing the world. I don't want to be one of those people.
English politics is so much more concerned with the proprieties than with defending dogmas.
I have, I must admit, despised the English countryside for much of my life - despised it and avoided it for its want of danger and adventure.
Humankind has been telling stories forever and will be telling stories forever.
I adore falseness. I don't want you to tell me accurately what happened yesterday. I want you to lie about it, to exaggerate, to entertain me.
As a natural historian, I don't believe in the consciousness of rocks or the opinions of rainbows or the convictions of slugs.
Because I'm a walker, natural history is my subject; I've always been obsessed with landscape, and I have an elegiac tone in most of my books.
I'm very aware when I share a stage with other writers that I'm much less driven than they are. I don't wake up in the middle of the night, pregnant with paragraphs. I don't suffer for my text twenty-four hours a day.
Retiring from writing is not to retire from life.
I was sick and tired of reading other people's epigraphs. They all seemed to be in ancient Greek, middle French or, when they were translated, they never seemed to relate to the book at hand. Basically, they seemed to be there just to baffle you and to impress you with how smart the writer is.
When the narrative itself starts knocking on the glassed-in box that was your prescription for how you were going to write this novel... you have to listen to it.
I'm not good at dialogue. I'm not good at holding a mirror up at a real world. I'm not good at believable characterisation.
I come from a working-class background where I was much more likely to read socialist books and leaflets than Bronte or Dickens - neither of whom I've yet read.
There is no comparison. The American landscape is so much more dangerous. They have real snakes, mountain lions, bears; we only have adders, and they're more frightened of us than we are of them.
I am not - thank heavens - one of those 'driven' writers who spend a fortnight buckled with empty fright over an untouched page only to wake at two in the morning feverish with paragraphs.
After 25 years sitting on my own in a room, I was looking for a more companionable job and wanted to work more collaboratively. I've also been very lucky in my career, with good advances and multibook deals. But there is some extent to which I worried that I was writing for the contract and not for the impulse of the thing itself.
I've never finished anything by Dickens.
Writers who want to interfere with adaptations of their work are basically undemocratic. The book still stands as an entity on its own.
The western view of Christ is usually of a stainless being with fair hair who appears to have come from Oslo.
