The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended.

Don't you find it rather heavy, to have everything really in front of you – all the people who are going to matter, whom you haven't met yet, all the choices you are going to have to make, everything you might achieve, and all the possible failures – unreal now? The future flaps round my head like a cloud of midges.

I did a lot of my writing as though I was an academic, doing some piece of research as perfectly as possible.

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

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.

Where would we be without inhibitions? Theyre quite useful things when you look at some of the things humans do if they lose them.

There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.