The distinctive feature of my family was intolerance of sensitivity and emotion - everything's great, it all has to be great all the time and why do you have to spoil it? Whereas probably the most fundamental and important thing to me has been defending my right to tell the truth about how I feel.

What other grown-up gets told how to do their job so often as a writer?

Help is dangerous because it exists outside the human economy: the only payment for help is gratitude.

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

I'm a novelist, not a social scientist or a commentator.

The distinctive feature of my family was intolerance of sensitivity and emotion - everything's great, it all has to be great all the time and why do you have to spoil it? Whereas probably the most fundamental and important thing to me has been defending my right to tell the truth about how I feel.

A creative writing workshop will contain students whose ambitions and abilities, whose conceptions of literature itself, are so diverse that what they have in common - the desire to write - could almost be considered meaningless.