I envy people who can think, 'No, I'm not going to work today' when they have a huge pile of deadlines stacking up.

My own belief is that most people are trying to do their best. It doesn't mean they have no nasty side, or that they don't have a bad temper, or that they have never done anything they feel ashamed of. But fiction operates on people waking up trying to be horrible, and I don't think most people are trying to be horrible.

We are usually undone by our lack of understanding of ourselves.

I don't think I'm an unkind person, I don't think my books are unkind, and I don't think my readers are unkind.

Most of the soap operas always use the Christmas special to kill huge quantities of their characters. So they have trams coming off their rails, or cars slamming into each other or burning buildings. It's a general clean-out.

My childhood was a happy one, spent in a tall house in South Kensington and later in East Sussex, but my early and mid teens were less successful.

People tend to view history as if it were another planet and think the modern world was invented in 1963. I don't agree.