Women were the ones that held the reins, it emerged.

My writing day has grown shorter as I've aged, although it seems to produce the same number of pages.

View your burden as a gift. It's the theme that has been given you to work with. Accept that and lean into it.

It seems to me that good novels celebrate the mystery in ordinary life, and summing it all up in psychological terms strips the mystery away

And she thought what a clean, simple life she would have led if it weren't for love.

For my own family, I would always choose the makeshift, surrogate family formed by various characters unrelated by blood.

I think it must be very hard to be one of the new young writers who are urged to put themselves forward when it may be the last thing on earth they'd be good at