Is birth always a fall?

Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

My grandmother was very fierce and gruff. She was quite small, but she was very wide.

When you're writing for the screen, you have to be hyper-conscious every moment of how the audience is going to react. If you write just one scene where the audience is confused or it breaks their concentration in some way, then you've lost them, and you might never get them back.

I don't read my books, I write them. Once I've finished the many years it usually takes me to write them, I can't bear to read them, because I've spent too long with them already. I'm not advertising them very well, am I?

Sometimes writing a novel is not unlike having a baby. You'd have to ask a female novelist to compare the pain.