Twin miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff.

Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.

I've got life for a subject because as life starts to drain away, you start seeing very clearly what life is, for the first time.

I taught myself Russian, which was very, very useful, especially for poetry and in fact if you can't read Pushkin in Russian, you're really missing something.

"Nationwide" featured an amazing collection of apprentice impersonators. From all over Britain, schoolchildren materialised via local studios to give us their imitations of the mighty. There were at least three uncannily accurate Margaret Thatchers, their eyelids fatigued with condescension and their voices swooping and whining like dive-bombers.

Sick of being a prisoner of my childhood, I want to put it behind me.

When I was very young, one of my favourite books was Captain's Courageous and I suppose one of the reasons I loved it, it was a life I knew I should have had, learning all the different bits of the ship and learning to catch fish and rig sails and to -all the things that I never learned and I never learned the discipline, but I hungered after it.