Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.

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

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

I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight.

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.

When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people's, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment - once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognise and do not believe in - what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception.

Learning how to be a good reader is what makes you a writer.