This is the pain-pleasure of having newly adult children; they're innocent and ruthless in forgetting their sweet old dependence.

She returned his gaze, struck by the sense of her own transformation, and overwhelmed by the beauty which a lifetime havit had taught her to ignore.

You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God?

The world should take note: not everything is getting worse.

Politics is the enemy of the imagination.

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.