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

I suppose, I said, it is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see.

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

I don't really believe in stories, only in the people who tell them.

If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse.

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.