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

If people read 'Tomorrow' and feel that it is offering them some view of my own household, they would be very, very wrong.

When anything goes digital, let alone something as immaterial as a book, there is a tendency to see it as just in the air to be taken, and to lose the sense that somebody once made it.

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 can do hieroglyphics in the margin. There are days when I really enjoy the flow of ink. I mean, nice pen, ink straight on to the page.

Novels, in my experience, are slow in coming, and once I've begun them I know I have years rather than months of work ahead of me.

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