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.

In domestic life the woman's value is inherent, unquantifiable; at home she exchanges proven values for mythological ones. She "wants" to be at home, and because she is a woman she's allowed to want it. This desire is her mystique, it is both what enables her to domesticate herself and what disempowers her.

Like the child, the creative writing student is posited as a centre of vulnerable creativity, needful of attention and authority.

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

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

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.

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.