I never have a problem with finding material. I wait for it to turn up, and it always turns up. It’s dealing with the material I’m inundated with that poses the problem.

People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable – deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.

They were all in their early thirties. An age at which it is sometimes hard to admit that what you are living is your life.

She was learning, quite late, what many people around her appeared to have known since childhood that life can be perfectly satisfying without major achievements.

A story ... has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.

The skin of everyday appearances stretched over such shamelessness, such consuming explosions of lust.

Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if you do you must hang onto it. You must not let yourself be waylaid, and have it taken from you.