No woman that I know is capable of leaving her child down for thirty seconds. She can't walk away without making sure that everything is absolutely as secure and safe for her child as can be.

Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you ­finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die.

I think young children in the Western middle classes are objects of incredible anxiety.

If you can just actually let the character be for a bit, then you get the right sense.

I am interested in levels of brain discourse. How articulate are the voices in your head? You know, there's a different voice for the phone, and a different voice if you're talking in bed. When you're starting off with a narrator, it's interesting to think, where is their voice coming from, what part of their brain?

The writing day can be, in some ways, too short, but it's actually a long series of hours, for months at a time, and there is a stillness there.

I do not think we remember our family in any real sense. We live in them instead