“Easily found, easily gathered, lives were the small change of this world, and if you lost a few, it didn't matter; there were always more.”

“He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real.”

“More seriously-and this is probably why there has been a lot of garbage talked about a lost generation-it was easy to see, all over the landscape of contemporary fiction, the devastating effect of the Thatcher years. So many of these writers wrote without hope. They had lost all ambition, all desire to to wrestle with the world. Their books dealt with tiny patches of the world, tiny pieces of human experience-a council estate, a mother, a father, a lost job. Very few writers had the courage or even the energy to bite off a big chunk of the universe and chew it over. Very few showed any linguistic or formal innovation. Many were dulled and therefore dull. (And then, even worse, there were the Hooray Henries and Sloanes who evidently thought that the day of the yuppie novel, and the Bellini-drinking, okay-yah fiction had dawned. Dukedoms and country-house bulimics abounded. It was plain that too may books were being published; that too many writers had found their way into print without any justification for it at all; that too many publishers had adopted a kind of random, scattergun policy of publishing for turnover and just hoping that something would strike a cord.When the general picture is so disheartening, it is easy to miss the good stuff. I agreed to be a judge for "Best of Young British Novelists II" because I wanted to find out for myself if the good stuff really was there. In my view, it is...One of my old schoolmasters was fond of devising English versions of the epigrams of Martial. I remember only one, his version of Martial's message to a particularly backward-looking critic: "You only praise the good old days We young 'uns get no mention. I don't see why I have to die To gain your kind attention.”

“Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained.”

“If you take a look at history, you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards, in order to express this idea.”

“Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another's, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.”

“It was always women who did the choosing, and men's place was to be grateful if they were lucky enough to be the chosen ones. Joseph Anton”