Every time I write a book, I've probably taken five years off my life.

Writing, more than any other art, is indexed to the worthiness of the self because it is identified in peoples minds with emotion.

A feminist man is a bit like a vegetarian: it's the humanitarian principle he's defending, I suppose.

For me, a novel is always the result of my attempt to impose myself on raw circumstances. It is a concrete form of lived experience.

As it stands, motherhood is a sort of wilderness through which each woman hacks her way, part martyr, part pioneer; a turn of events from which some women derive feelings of heroism, while others experience a sense of exile from the world they knew.

Society in the English countryside is still strangely, quaintly divided. If black comedy and a certain type of social commentary are what you want, I think English rural communities offer quite a lot of material.

We who were born were not witnesses to our birth: like death, it is something we are forever after trying to catch sight of.