The idea was to focus on the primal drama of parenthood: the way from moment to moment you swing from comforter to tormentor, just as kids simultaneously light up our lives and drive us nuts. I was trying to capture that strange, bipolar quality of parenthood. For all that being a parent is normal statistically, it's not normal psychologically. It produces some of the most extreme emotions you'll ever have.

I look back one more time. It's like a crater, a hole where something happened.

I tend to be so lost in the work that I don't notice the weather. My partner will come home and say, 'Beautiful day, wasn't it?' and I'll say, 'Was it?' as I won't have noticed the real world at all.

In the world I notice persons are nearly always stressed and have no time...I don't know how persons with jobs do the jobs and all the living as well...I guess the time gets spread very thin like butter all over the world, the roads and houses and playgrounds and stores, so there's only a little smear of time on each place, then everyone has to hurry on to the next bit.

You're meant to have an unhappy childhood to be a writer, but there's a lot to be said for a very happy one that just let's you get on with it.

We used to call it her Cinderella complex, because often when she had agreed to go out in the evening she would be seized by panic and announce that she had nothing to wear.

You cannot predict literary success; the only way you can possibly aim for it is to do your thing and do it well.