I didn't write anything until I was well over 30.

All I know for certain is that reading is of the most intense importance to me; if I were not able to read, to revisit old favorites and experiment with names new to me, I would be starved - probably too starved to go on writing myself.

I have had to empty two family homes during the last few years - first, the house that had been my grandmothers since 1923, and then my own country home, which we had lived in for over twenty years.

I am addicted to arrivals, to those innocent dawn moments from which history accelerates.

The past is our ultimate privacy; we pile it up, year by year, decade by decade, it stows itself away, with its perverse random recall system.

The idea that memory is linear is nonsense. What we have in our heads is a collection of frames. As to time itself-can it be linear when all these snatches of other presents exist at once in your mind? A very elusive and tricky concept, time.

I didn't want it to be a book that made pronouncements.