As a novelist, I suppose I can say that I'm highly articulate. But I know, as a person, in other ways, I'm not always articulate. I think we are all, from time to time, inarticulate, at some level, about some things.

My mother was a great bringer-up of children. My memories are of a sense of security and comfort.

What we wish upon the future is very often the image of some lost, imagined past.

My upbringing was absolutely not the archetypal writer's upbringing. Even, arguably, the opposite.

Ah, children, pity level-crossing keepers, pity lock-keepers - pity lighthouse-keepers - pity all the keepers of this world (pity even school teachers), caught between their conscience and the bleak horizon.

I had a fear of becoming anything, a fear of becoming a specialist. I might have become a doctor, but if you become a doctor, that's your specialty in life and you are defined by it. One of the attractions of being a writer is that you're never a specialist. Your field is entirely open; your field is the entire human condition.

I like the world we've got. If there is anything special and magical, I have to find it in the ordinary stuff.