It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.

I rather like getting away from fiction.

The pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters; the novel is such a wonderfully flexible form.

Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.

I didn't think I had anything particular to say, but I thought I might have something to say to children.

Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.

The place didn't look the same but it felt the same; sensations clutched and transformed me. I stood outside some concrete and plate-glass tower-block, picked a handful of eucalyptus leaves from a branch, crushed them in my hand, smelt, and tears came to my eyes. Sixty-seven-year-old Claudia, on a pavement awash with packaged American matrons, crying not in grief but in wonder that nothing is ever lost, that everything can be retrieved, that a lifetime is not linear but instant. That, inside the head, everything happens at once.