I Do Not Think I Responded Immediately,

If You Were A Boy And A Girl And You Were In Love With Each Other, Really, Properly In Love, And If You Could Show It, Then The People Who Run Hailsham, They Sorted It Out For You. They Sorted It Out So You Could Have A Few Years Together Before You Began Your Donations.

You Could Say I'd Rewritten The Same Novel Three Times And I Thought I Had To Move On. The Success Of The Book, And Then The Movie, Had By Then Also Created A Commercial Expectation And I Remember Touring America And Seeing People In The Audiences Who I Thought Might Not Want To Read The Books I Wanted To Write Next. My Constituency Had Become Broader, But More Mysterious To Me.

And If These Incidents Now Seem Full Of Significance And All Of A Piece, It's Probably Because I'm Looking At Them In The Light Of What Came Later.

People Aren't Quite Sure What It Means When A Book Is A Booker Prize Winner. They're Not Quite Sure What Is Being Recommended, What Literary Values It Stands For, Because Every Year It Stands For Something Different.

Memory, I Realize, Can Be An Unreliable Thing; Often It Is Heavily Coloured By The Circumstances In Which One Remembers.