As writers go, I have a skin of average thickness. I am pleased by a good review, disappointed by a bad. None of it penetrates far enough to influence the thing I write next.

My children are living, thinking human beings. It isn't in my power to regret them, for they belong to themselves.

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

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

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

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

Human beings have a need, generally, to destroy things. The Freudian principle of civilisation is correct. There's always, always a difference between the family image and the reality.