She was made for untidy rooms and rumpled beds.

New York is a wonderful place to be up, an awful place to be down.

Botswana is actually very peaceful. It's democratic. It never was in debt. They've been fortunate, they've had diamonds.

This is another thing which I really like investigating in my novels: what is it that makes an intimate society, that makes a society in which moral concern for others will be possible? Part of that I think are manners and ritual. We tried to get rid of manners, we tried to abolish manners in the '60s. Manners were very, very old-fashioned and un-cool. And of course we didn't realise that manners are the building blocks of proper moral relationships between people.

Any author of fiction will tell you that characters don't need to be told what to do.

I just focus on getting the first scene right, with a few lines about the overall plot, and then the book grows organically.

Oh I love gadgets and I pride myself on keeping at the cutting edge of technology.