Finish the day's writing when you still want to continue.

To try to expunge an individual's history is a terrible violation.

I can remember being in my pram: children stayed in their prams much longer then than they do now. A big bouncy pram with black covers and a hood with metal clips that could trap your fingers. I was looking up at my sister who was sitting on the pram seat, with her back to me.

Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.

Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words.

I enjoy research; in fact research is so engaging that it would be easy to go on for years, and never write the novel at all.

A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into.