'I was constructing narrative long before I could actually write it. If no one ever read or performed my work I would still keep on doing it.'

'These fanciful accounts seek to minimise the role of the artist or the writer as if they were merely a conduit for some larger, more explicable force. '

'I write biography, social history and memoir and yet I have learned from them all; factual writing borrowing some of fiction's clothes.'

'Having left a completed draft well alone for a month or more I go back, cooler, chastened, ready to repent at leisure.'

'A Victorian Gothic villa which I immediately recognised because it's on a hill in my home town of Folkestone. I can see it now as I sit here writing. '

'Literature's influence on us is at once less dramatic yet far deeper than the simplistic process implied by suggesting that a single volume could be life-changing.'

'What you can't come to terms with is that the year 1955 has gone. Suddenly. Irretrievably. Inexplicably.'

'She recited poems to me that she'd learned at school before leaving at 14 to tend to soldiers returning wounded from the First World War.'

'I write because I found out early that it was very, very good fun: there was licence and liberty in it. '

'I've travelled all over the world from Nigeria to Bali, but hardly a day has gone by without giving myself a good dose of thirty pages minimum. '