The trouble is that once you see it, you can't unsee it. And once you've seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There's no innocence. Either way, you're accountable.

It is true that success is the most boring thing, it is tinny and brittle, failure runs deeper. Success is dangerous. I have a very complicated relationship with that word.

The writer is the midwife of understanding.

Terrorism is the symptom, not the disease.

Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things. And here we are with our crash helmets on, with concertina wire all around us.

Memory was that woman on the train. Insane in the way she sifted through dark things in a closet and emerged with the most unlikely ones - a fleeting look, a feeling. The smell of smoke. A windscreen wiper. A mother's marble eyes. Quite sane in the way she left huge tracts of darkness veiled. Unremembered.

...a political struggle that does not have women at the heart of it, above it, below it, and within it is no struggle at all.