I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.

The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.

I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.

I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.

The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.

Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.

Small things start us in new ways of thinking