IT WAS TESS who told me about the crowd going to the all-night dance. We'd been school friends. We'd picked mushrooms and pretended to have seen a big ship. She had got married since I went away; it was a made match, a man from the midlands, a Donal, who had worked in a garage but took to farming, out all day, draining fields and callows so that he could till them and sow corn.

I have always espoused chastity except when one can no longer resist the temptation.

What matters is the imaginative truth.

History is said to be written by the victors. Fiction, by contrast, is largely the work of injured bystanders.

That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.

It's not the vote women need, we should be armed.

She was an auxiliary nurse but training to be a true nurse because that was her calling, to serve mankind. She was a Martha. There were Marys and Marthas, but Marys got all the limelight because of being Christ's handmaiden, but Marthas were far more sincere.