And this shows that sometimes people want to be stupid and they do not want to know the truth.

Every life is narrow. Our only escape is not to run away, but to learn to love the people we are and the world in which we find ourselves.

I don't mean that literary fiction is better than genre fiction, On the contrary; novels can perform two functions and most perform only one.

A lot of roles for people with disabilities are quite patronising. It's a real pity when they are just used to give dull PC kudos to a drama, or when they're wheeled on in a tokenistic way without any real involvement in the plot.

The one thing you have to do if you write a book is put yourself in someone else's shoes. The reader's shoes. You've got to entertain them.

You love someone, you've got to let something go.

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.