I know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I'm ill is that there is an almost total absence of sexuality in his world, which is restful.

It's because I'm a feminist that I can't stand women limiting other women's imaginations. It really makes me angry.

Louis de Bernires is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh. . .he has only to look into his world, one senses, for it to rush into reality, colours and touch and taste.

You can understand a lot about yourself by working out which fairytale you use to present your world to yourself in.

Good writing is always new.

I have a dreadful fear that the more you try to prevent revealing the self the more you do.

You did not so much mind being -conventionally- betrayed, if you were not kept in the dark, which was humiliating, or defined only as a wife and dependent person, which was annihilating.