We have a number of very powerful women in the world now - Mrs. [Angela] Merkel, who the Germans call Mutti. What did we call Mrs. [Margaret] Thatcher? When she was minister of education, she stopped the children's free school milk. This may sound quaint, but after the war we were such a malnourished nation that part of the founding of the welfare state were public health initiatives. Every little schoolchild got milk. Mrs. Thatcher stopped it. They called her "Maggie Thatcher, milk snatcher."

To a Brit of my generation, one of the most objectionable things about [Margaret] Thatcher is her falsity. She is a total construct. For one thing, she had a made-over accent.

Insights don't usually arrive at my desk, but go into notebooks when I'm on the move. Or half-asleep.

In terms of essays, I would say Oliver Sacks. His breadth of hard knowledge and imagination and empathy seems to constitute the perfect mind to me.

A novel should be a book of questions, not a book of answers.

I didn't cry much after I was 35, but staggered stony-faced into middle age, a handkerchief still in my bag just in case.

I am very happy in second-hand bookshops; would a gardener not be happy in a garden?