When I'm in a good mood I like to cook. But I don't like saying it in public because I find myself being resentful of the idea; "Now you will make a good wife. You can cook, right?" So when people ask me I go, "No, I don't like cooking!"

The best novels are those that are important without being like medicine; they have something to say, are expansive and intelligent but never forget to be entertaining and to have character and emotion at their centre.

We do not just risk repeating history if we sweep it under the carpet, we also risk being myopic about our present.

When the writing is going well, I'm obsessive. I don't shower, I don't take phone calls, I hardly respond to text messages, I don't do email. I take breaks only to read, and usually I read poetry. When it's not going well, I just lie in bed and eat chocolate.

Yes, there's a problem with gender as it is today, and we must fix it, we must do better.

I think human beings exist in a social world. I write realistic fiction, and so it isn't that surprising that the social realities of their existence would be part of the story.

...there was cement in her soul. It had been there for a while, an early morning disease of fatigue, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she could be living, that over the months melded into a piercing homesickness.