Whatever happens to you, embrace it, the good and the bad equally. Death is just one more thing to be embraced.

Because I write fiction, I don't write autobiography, and to me they are very different things. The first-person narrative is a very intimate thing, but you are not addressing other people as 'I' - you are inhabiting that 'I.'

What if we had a chance to do it again and again, until we finally did get it right? Wouldn't that be wonderful?

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.

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.

I'm a lapsed Quaker. I don't go to meetings any more. But I'm very drawn to Catholicism - all that glitter. I'd love to be a Catholic. I think it would be fantastic - faith, forgiveness, absolution, extreme unction - all these wonderful words. I don't think anyone who was ever born a Catholic hasn't died a Catholic, no matter how lapsed they are.

If you don't have a unique voice, then you're not really a writer.