John McGovern taught me that it's OK to write repeatedly about the same things.

I am violently untidy. My desk is overcrowded. I write my first drafts in longhand in a long notebook using a plastic throwaway fountain pen. Then I work on a word processor using a different desk and a different room.

She was lonely without Blunt, but she was lonelier at the idea that the world went on as though she had not loved him.

I was first in Sydney in 1993, and have been a few times since then. For someone who didn't know Australia, it came as a shock how intelligent, interesting and funny the people were. If I lived there I might see it differently, but as a visitor it was a lot of fun.

I first went to Barcelona in 1975 after university, and I stayed for three years. I learnt Catalan because that's what everyone speaks in the mountains. They speak English to foreigners, but what people say to each other is much more important than what they say to you.

Writing tends to be very deliberate. A novelist could probably run a military campaign with some success. They could certainly run a country.

Between the ages of 8 and 12 it was difficult to know what my father was saying, and he moved very slowly, and then he died.