[H]ope takes you by the throat like a stranger, it makes your heart leap.

A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it.

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

It's not easy to diagnose because depending where the endometrial deposits are, the symptoms can be quite different. It's an unrecognized problem among teenage girls, and it's something that every young woman who has painful menstruation should be aware of... It's a condition that is curable if it's caught early. If not, if it's allowed to run on, it can cause infertility, and it can really, really mess up your life.

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

In order to successfully impersonate men, the woman [Margaret Thatcher] launched a war.

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