I don't like gurus. I don't like people who ask you to follow or believe. I like people who ask you to think independently.

In my mind's eye Shakespeare is a huge, hot sea-beast, with fire in his veins and ice on his claws and inscrutable eyes, who looks like an inchoate hump under the encrustations of live barnacle-commentaries, limpets and trailing weeds.

Books that change you, even later in life, give you a kind of electrical shock as the world takes a different shape.

Good writing is always new.

The more research you do, the more at ease you are in the world you're writing about. It doesn't encumber you, it makes you free.

You know, it's a truism that writers for children must still be children themselves, deep down, must still feel childish feelings, and a child's surprise at the world.

I grew up with that completely fictive idea of motherhood, where the mother never strayed from the kitchen. All the women in my books are very afraid that if they do anything with their minds they won't be complete women. I don't think my daughters' generation has that feeling.