In my 20s I was in constant pain from undiagnosed endometriosis. With no prospect of a cure, I decided I needed a career - writing - that could accommodate being ill.

To me, Hillary [Clinton] looks alright. She looks like the kind of woman I admire. She doesn't seem to have distorted her essential nature.

Sometimes peace looks like war, you cannot tell them apart.

The weight of the old world is stifling, and trying to shovel its weight off your life is tiring just to think about. The constant shuttling of opinions is tiring, and the shuffling of papers across desks, the chopping of logic and the trimming of attitudes. There must, somewhere, be a simpler, more violent world.

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.

Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who'd stayed at home.

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.