I'm interested in character and dialogue and exchange of ideas.

Be content with who you are and where you are, and do whatever you can do to bring to others such contentment, and joy, and understanding that you have managed to find yourself.

I cannot see myself in a new car. I am a tiny white van person. That is what i want!

Who can't like pigs? They're wonderful creatures! I've always liked pigs.

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.

How many of us are happy to be exactly where we are at any moment?...only the completely happy think that they are in the correct place.

Everybody has friends they dislike; people who they have slipped into relationships with, people they would not have chosen had they been more cautious, more circumspect.