The water was cold but it soon warms up when the boys are made of sunshine.

They say you know nothing at eighteen. But there are things you know at eighteen that you will never know again.

He knew nothing about policy and taxes or what makes a people, and now, God help him, he was like those kids who think their country is Google. ‘You’re just not going deep enough,’ Luke said. ‘Money has imploded. Religion has gone mad. Privacy is disappearing. The ice-cap is melting and children are starving to death. And you want to sing an old song about national togetherness.

The summer remembers nothing of the winter and nature is a kind of amnesia.

Art you can flush down the loo means nothing to me, even were the loo to be selected by Marcel Duchamp.

Like children all over the world, by the age of 10 I’d come to believe that most of the really humane creatures were not really human at all.

As an old creative industry full of cruelty and moral sense, British journalism once flourished on the imperative that people required the truth in order to survive. But people don’t require that now. They want sensation and they want it for nothing.

I’ve been asked which of the other arts novel-writing is most like, and I have come to believe it is acting. Of course, in terms of pattern it can be like music, in terms of structure it can be like painting, but the job to me is most like acting.

I was 10 when I realised I couldn’t stand football. I’d tried, obviously, before this – no one wants to give in to social pariah-hood without a fight. I had stood frozen on pitches, done some running about and shouted a lot, as though I cared.

MEMORY IS A KIND of friendship, a friendship with the more necessary parts of oneself. How often do we reach for the past’s genial knowledge to meet the unknowables of the present, asking once again that the anterior world might blossom into life and colour the current day? In this at least I cannot be alone.