As soon as you move through the hospital doors you've removed yourself from real life. From the world we know. It's an alien world. Just enter those gates and you are in alien territory.

As soon as you move through the hospital doors you've removed yourself from real life. From the world we know. It's an alien world. Just enter those gates and you are in alien territory.

My idea in Half the Kingdom was simply, or not so simply perhaps, that medical science has given us twenty extra years of life. Those twenty extra years - one is grateful for them, one is happy, but they also give you ten or twenty years more of losing your faculties. That is actually the origin of my notion. Once you live longer than you're supposed to live, things go dreadfully wrong. But nevertheless, you're not dead.

I'm bad at thinking about society. I love to make fun of very small aspects. For instance the privacy rules we have in the States. Where you sign this thing that you've never read, and if you ever read it you discover there's no privacy whatsoever. But I don't know how to think sociologically, to tell you the truth. My son is a political scientist and my daughter-in-law is a sociologist. I can't think that way. I am not a good political militant at all. I keep thinking about what the other side must look like.

I read on a Kindle. I must be of the opinion that the new way to read is a pretty good way to read. It's a new way. Those of us who like the smell of books get upset but nevertheless this is the way we're going.

Franz Kafka is a huge influence, more than the Grimms. To allow yourself to get into the coal bucket and fly to the sky ... we learned that from Kafka, that you can have a thought and make a body of it in this way.

I imagine witches to be people who sit around like my witty grandmother, people who are injustice collectors or humiliation collectors. I choose to imagine that's what a witch is. The reason witches are so evil is because they're so unhappy and so hurt.