The complexion of a novelist is seldom rosy (Paul Bailey once announced to a heavy-hearted audience of novelists at PEN that we have always been an ugly tribe). We are engaged in indoor activity, haemorrhoidal, prone to chillblains, poor of circulation.

Jane Austen we know never let two men converse alone in any novel because what they said would be unknown to her.

I gave myself to my children. It happens to some women.

If you've not been loved as a child, you don't know how to love a child.

I just knew I would be a writer. It just seemed the only sensible thing to do.

Somewhere inside we do know everything about ourselves. There is no real forgetting. Perhaps we know somewhere, too, about all there is to come.

I think the most dangerous influence for a young writer is to be treated with cynicism or discouragement.