Objectivity is just male subjectivity.

I have two ideas for novels at the moment, neither of them all that conventional, but I'm not ready to choose between them yet, let alone settle down to the process of writing.

Contemporary Britain seems an endlessly fascinating place to me - but if I knew a little bit more about other places, and other times, maybe it wouldn't.

It seems to me that you would have to write a novel on a very small, intimate scale for it not to become political.

But I have always - ever since The Accidental Woman - written novels about individuals attempting to make choices in the context of situations over which they have no control.

Well, I like the rain before it falls.

Ah, well, I have no talent for nonfiction, that's my problem.