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.

The woman who thinks she can choose femininity, can toy with it like the social drinker toys with wine - well, she's asking for it, asking to be undone, devoured, asking to spend her life perpetrating a new fraud, manufacturing a new fake identity, only this time it's her equality that's fake.

That's writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn't turn up.

I think a lot of artists no longer want to participate in or be associated with narrative because of its corruptedness in contemporary culture.

Christianity has kept itself going for centuries on hope alone, and has perpetrated all manner of naughtiness in the meantime.

People are least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them.

Honest criticism, I suppose, has its place. But honest writing is infinitely more valuable.