Advice to young writers? Always the same advice: learn to trust our own judgment, learn inner independence, learn to trust that time will sort the good from the bad– including your own bad.

I am so happy to be communicating with people on this newest of new wavelengths which to some older people must seem like a kind of magic.

We've got to believe in our beautiful impossible blueprints.

It usually takes me a year to do a book. A year or eighteen months.

And it does no harm to repeat, as often as you can, 'Without me the literary industry would not exist: the publishers, the agents, the sub-agents, the sub-sub-agents, the accountants, the libel lawyers, the departments of literature, the professors, the theses, the books of criticism, the reviewers, the book pages- all this vast and proliferating edifice is because of this small, patronized, put-down and underpaid person.'

I hated the 1960's feminists," she says. "They were dogmatists, you see. In comes ideology, and out goes common sense. This is my experience of life.

Whenever I met anyone who knew anything, I would bore them stiff until they told me what they knew.