When people use that stream of consciousness, it's kind of just a term they use for anything that looks slightly different on the page.

Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship can be survived.

(Feedback) People become addicted to it. That’s why journalism is so popular, because you want to hear, every day, what people think of what you just wrote. I think a little patience on that front can be good, too.

All tastes are expressions of belief.

And it's just anathema to being a writer. It's not healthy. But in another way, when I'm writing, what it's about for me is being good on the page. None of that noise could change the way I feel about my writing. Which is not always particularly positive.

I'm just interested in women's friendships generally. It always seems to me, and this is just my pet theory, that women are kind of at the sharp end of capitalism one way or another. Mainly because they buy everything. In a practical sense, women buy most things. They're always comparing - to friends, to famous people, to other people. An obsessive act of comparison.

All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies.