My mother hoped I'd be a plumber.

I said in my acceptance speech that I hope that readers remember this not as the year I won the Booker, but the year that there were six extraordinary books on the shortlist.

He reasoned that, as there was nothing he could do about his feelings, he must avoid acting on them.

Most of us have loved. And the terror for a writer is that readers will forgive you so much, but they won’t forgive you one false note about love, about which they too are expert.

I had some bad jobs when I was young. Writing is not one of them. If you’re fortunate enough to reach my age, to still be writing, you have to be grateful, and I am. I’ve been lucky. For many years, all I’ve done is writing, and it’s all I’ve ever wanted to do.

Evans understood that if Nakamura chose, it would be indiscriminately and their number would include the sickest – and perhaps most likely the sickest, because they were of least use to Nakamura – and that all of them would die. If, on the other hand, he, Dorrigo, chose, he could pick the fittest, the ones he thought had the best chance of living. And most would die anyway. That was his choice: to refuse to help the agent of death, or to be his servant.

Duty to his wife. Duty to his children. Duty to work, to committees, to charities. Duty to Lynette. Duty to the other women. It was exhausting. It demanded stamina. At times he amazed even himself.

I think sometimes writers must attempt to communicate the incommunicable, because, whether they wish it or not, they’re the ones to whom it falls.

Memory’s only like justice, because it is another wrong idea that makes people feel right.

Vassals of an outdated ideology unrelated to the real world, they can, when questioned on this issue, only mumble neoliberal mantras that have delivered the world economic stagnation, rising inequality and global environmental crisis.