And if these incidents now seem full of significance and all of a piece, it's probably because I'm looking at them in the light of what came later.

There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.

One is not struck by the truth until prompted quite accidentally by some external event.

What is difficult is the promotion, balancing the public side of a writer's life with the writing. I think that's something a lot of writers are having to face. Writers have become much more public now.

I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.

I grew up in Britain before it became a multicultural place, so in many ways I have a nostalgia for an England that's vanished - the England of my childhood has actually disappeared.

She always wanted to believe in things.