Of course I didn't pioneer the use of food in fiction: it has been a standard literary device since Chaucer and Rabelais, who used food wonderfully as a metaphor for sensuality.

Anything based on ancient texts is difficult for a modern reader to get their head around.

I am fascinated by how people eat and what it reveals about them.

I'm phobic about the idea of being constrained.

Places have their own characters. . . . But the people begin to look the same.

All those moments, those memories. Everything that we are, compressed in just two or three kilos of paper — the weight of a human heart.

If you want something you can have it, but you have to do some work. It's the ethic my mother brought me up with.