I'm one of these children who grew up at the knee of my grandmother and her elder sister, listening to very old people talk about their memories.

When I began to read as an adult, I read almost exclusively novelists of a generation back. I did the Russians, then I started getting more up to date. When you become published and become a reviewer, piles of books come along and you are pushed by fashion and what you are commissioned to do.

When people begin to talk about "our island story" my hackles rise. It is deluded and conservative.

Though I have never thought of myself as a book collector, there are shelves in our house browsed so often, on so many rainy winter nights, that the contents have seeped into me as if by osmosis.

It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

For many imaginative writers, working for the press is a fact of their life. But it's best not to like it too much.

I will get into trouble, I am sure, because since my Kate Middleton speech and before, certain papers were after me. I am not saying, however, that it would have been moral or right to assassinate Mrs. [Margaret] Thatcher, but I know it will be read that way. I know it will cause a problem.