I find it very difficult to talk about unwritten works. It's never useful to start putting words casually around the flimsiest of notions. I finished Saturday only in late November and I'm now in the rather pleasant stage of traveling, reading and waiting.

Above all, she wanted to look as though she had not given the matter a moment's thought, and that would take time.

At the back of my mind I had a sense of us sitting about waiting for some terrible event, and then I would remember that it had already happened.

Novels without female characters were a lifeless desert.

And feeling clever, I've always thought, is just a sigh away from being cheerful.

Reading groups, readings, breakdowns of book sales all tell the same story: when women stop reading, the novel will be dead.

It marked the beginning and, of course, an end. At that moment a chapter, no, a whole stage of my closed. Had I known, and had there been a spare second or two, I might have allowed myself a little nostalgia.