Oh, God. What was happening to her, she was turning into a normal person.

I did feel when my mother died if anyone was going to haunt me it would be her. And she hasn't, so I think it is possibly the end.

Some people spend their whole lives looking for themselves, yet our self is the one thing we surely cannot lose (how like a cheap philosopher I am become, staying in this benighted place). From the moment we are conceived it is the pattern in our blood and our bones are printed through with it like sticks of seaside rock. Nora, on the other hand, says that she’s surprised anyone knows who they are, considering that every cell and molecule in our bodies has been replaced many times over since we were born.

I have been to the world's end and back and now I know what I would put in my bottom drawer .I would put my sisters.

Everyone said, 'Well, you're very old for a first novel,' and I said, 'How do you write when you haven't lived? How do you write when you have no experience? How do you write straight out of university?

Ethics are not necessarily to do with being law-abiding. I am very interested in the moral path, doing the right thing.

When you chopped logs with the ax and they split open they smelled beautiful, like Christmas. But when you split someone's head open it smelled like abattoir and quite overpowered the scent of the wild lilacs you'd cut and brought into the house only this morning, which was already another life.