It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies- it seeped in with every draught in the house; people brought it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their newspapers. There was no way to control it.

Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All that matters is what you leave on the page.

First rule of writing: When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.

If you're going to write a good book, you have to make mistakes and you have to not be so cautious all the time.

You're a library of me.

A lot of women, when they're young, feel they have very good friends, and find later on that friendship is complicated. It's easy to be friends when everyone's 18. It gets harder the older you get, as you make different life choices, as people say in America. A lot of women's friendships begin to founder.

The young people have a phrase for this now, which is "slay in your lane." That's a very important principle of writing. You have to work out what it is you can't do, obscure it, and focus on what works.