...and there was nothing to do except to wait and to hurt.

People say that you always have to tell the truth. But they do not mean this because you are not allowed to tell old people that they are old and you are not allowed to tell people if they smell funny or if a grown-up has made a fart. And you are not allowed to say, 'I don't like you,' unless that person has been horrible to you.

At 20, 25, 30, we begin to realise that the possibilities of escape are getting fewer. We have jobs, children, partners, debts. This is the part of us to which literary fiction speaks.

Jane Austen was writing about boring people with desperately limited lives. We forget this because we've seen too many of her books on screen.

I find people confusing.

I thought Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything was remarkable. Managing to be entertaining while still delivering all that hard science was a pretty good trick to pull off.

For me, disability is a way of getting some extremity, some kind of very difficult situation, that throws an interesting light on people.