When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.

She devoured stories with rapacious greed, ranks of black marks on white, sorting themselves into mountains and trees, stars, moons and suns, dragons, dwarfs, and forests containing wolves, foxes and the dark.

Lists are a form of power.

She didn't like to be talked about. Equally, she didn't like not to be talked about, when the high-minded chatter rushed on as though she was not there. There was no pleasing her, in fact. She had the grace, even at eleven, to know there was no pleasing her. She thought a lot, analytically, about other people's feelings, and had only just begun to realize that this was not usual, and not reciprocated.

I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.

I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the second world war.

An odd phrase, "by heart," he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.