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“In the past, I used to counter any such notions by asking myself: 'Would you really want President Hattersley?' I now find that possibility rather cheers me up. With his chubby, Dickensian features and his knowledge of T.H. Green and other harmless leftish political classics, Hattersley might not be such a bad thing after all.”
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“The past actually happened. History is what someone took the time to write down.”
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“I didn't think about anything past tomorrow because anything past tomorrow was just like cloud busting - it depended soley on the person looking at the clouds and it could rain any minute”
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“Get up now and go and find Robert Kilroy-Silk. Smile in a warm, friendly sort of way, then punch him on the nose. Now go and find Robert on television, despite my best endeavours, this is still relatively easy to do. Wait for a close-up, same smile, and punch him on the nose. If you followed the instructions carefully, you will have noticed a distinct difference. On the one hand, you were suffused with a sense of public-spirited righteousness; on the other, you're probably dribbling blood. That's the difference between reality in life and reality on television.”
Source : "'My discoveries weren't any more extensive or alarming than most people's. I just chose to look'". Interview with Antonia Crane, logger.believermag.com. November 5, 2013. 
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“The language itself is what gets me interested in writing. It's weird to me that words exist. Never a dull moment with words. They're a layer between our minds and the physical reality around us, obviously, but the layer seems like it's always in flux, like an asteroid belt, constantly moving.”
Source : "Cartographer of Word Galaxies". The Believer interview, logger.believermag.com. September 24, 2013.
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“The reality of a serious writer is a reality of many voices, some of them belonging to the writer, some of them belonging to the world of readers at large.”
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“Now, of my threescore years and ten, Twenty will not come again.”
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“I’m not a fan of ‘write what you know.’ If you don’t know, find out. I knew nothing about the Bible before I started writing ‘The Year of Living Biblically.’ That was kind of the point – to learn.”
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“If you imagine writing 1,000 words a day, which most journalists do, that would be a very long book a year.”
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“Once every five hundred years or so, a summary statement about poetry comes along that we can't imagine ourselves living without”
