I'm always determined that as a novelist I'm going to go out there and research my characters very thoroughly before I start writing.

This is the forked tongue of grief again. It whispers in one ear: return to what you once loved best, and in the other ear it whispers, move on.

I was astonished to find that the positions my grandfather had defended were now overgrown and entangled with trees and thorns. I suppose I had developed a sense of reverence for the locations he described in his memoirs and letters - the forts and the high emplacements. I had expected them to have been preserved in some way.

Horror in your country is something you take a dose of to remind yourself that you are not suffering from it.

I think bravery means a different thing to everyone.

I like to push characters to extremes so they have to make really tough decisions and there is no life more extreme than that of an athlete.

We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, 'I survived'.