Reading is another thing that has made me more human by exposing me to worlds I might never have entered and people I might never meet.

I think books in which people are really happy and things are going well are probably the most challenging novels there are to write, and there are very few of them.

I believe that in a contest between the living and the almost living, the latter must, if necessary, give way to the will of the former.

I think that we really fool ourselves about our ability to be safe and secure nowadays.

When children are small, parents should run their lives and not the other way around.

Not writing at all leads to nothing.

I'm boggled by the idea of being an only child. I know nothing at all (I'm happy to say) about having had a cold and withholding mother, about being divorced. The more I've been writing novels, each novel I've written has become successively less grounded in anything approaching autobiography.