I absolutely don't dislike children - I would choose their company over adult company any time.

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.

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.

The writing you allude to is a form of dissent, but it's also expressive of the need to evolve beyond what is turgid and stale in contemporary fiction.

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.

I remain fascinated by where you go as a woman once you are a mother, and if you ever come back.