I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.

A story is how we construct our experiences.

The human community is evolving... . We can survive anything you care to mention. We are supremely equipped to survive, to adapt and even in the long run to start thinking.

For there is never any way to go but in.

Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.

They can't give a Nobel to someone who's dead so I think they were probably thinking they had better give it to me now.

When there's a war, people get married.