I don't think it's any fun, even if you are one of the most respected authors in the world like Margaret Atwood, to keep being nominated and not win.

Many of our deepest motives come, not from an adult logic of how things work in the world, but out of something that is frozen from childhood.

Love isn't about when you first meet. It's about the many, many years you spend together, when you're trying to keep that flame burning.

I saw a new world coming rapidly. More scientific, efficient, yes. More cures for the old sicknesses. Very good. But a harsh, cruel, world. And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind world, one that she knew in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go.

I've always had a great fondness for English detective fiction such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.

I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they'd once belonged to the sea.

As a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.