I'm waiting for the day when my children cease to find my domestic propriety reassuring and actually find it annoying.

To become a mother is to learn a whole language - to relearn it, perhaps, as it was the tongue to which we were born - and hence gain entrance to a forgotten world of comprehension.

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.

Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative.

The reaction to 'Aftermath' has been far worse than to 'A Life's Work,' yet I find I'm perhaps a little less touched by it. In both cases, I've coped artistically by believing the criticisms weren't right. They upset me, but they didn't challenge my understanding of how to write, nor of how morality functions in literature.

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

I am a good and interested mother - which has surprised me.