Every time you watch a performance in the theatre, you know that this is just for you, and will never be the same again. It is quite exciting for me.

Writers feel that they can't afford to wait. They must do it now, and they are so clever, and there is so much competition. I'm quite happy to wait, and quite confident that the muses will cross the stream.

The extraordinarily facile and in literary terms long lived works tend to be about ordinary people. Even Sappho writes about the utterly insignificant . What art can do is make the extraordinary more ordinary and ordinary more extraordinary.

Every time you watch a performance in the theatre, you know that this is just for you, and will never be the same again. It is quite exciting for me.

Despite the war, and bombings, and all the big things that happen to us, the stuff of our lives is small and always will be. During a war it is different, but even then, it is perfectly possible to write novels during a major war, which are about those thing which endure. It is what makes us human and the thing which is going to keep going.

It is terribly important to maintain a national identity in a way that it probably wasn't before.

I want to write the sort the book that my people want to read, even if the market is small.