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.

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.

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

I felt that I could swim for miles, out into the ocean: a desire for freedom, an impulse to move, tugged at me as though it were a thread fastened to my chest. It was an impulse I knew well, and I had learned that it was not the summons from a larger world I used to believe it to be. It was simply a desire to escape from what I had.

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

Having your second child, in case you were wondering, is a lot harder than having your first, except for those people who find it easier. I'm afraid I don't have the latest figures to confirm this.