History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.

I once stole a book. It was really just the once, and at the time I called it borrowing. It was 1970, and the book, I could see by its lack of date stamps, had been lying unappreciated on the shelves of my convent school library since its publication in 1945.

I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'

Why are we so attached to the severities of the past? Why are we so proud of having endured our fathers and our mothers, the fireless days and the meatless days, the cold winters and the sharp tongues? It's not as if we had a choice.

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

Some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you put into every sentence an overflow of meaning, and you create in every sentence as many resonances and double meanings and ambiguities as you can possibly pack in there, so that people can read it again and get something new each time.

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