'So I write about lives under totalitarian regimes, in the hope I'll offer some sort of inoculation against political extremism.'

'I now find it difficult to read fiction while I am writing it; I'm looking at structure, style, technique, how dialogue is handled, rather than being carried away.'

'The self, looking for the self, is the perpetually failing attempt to locate some defining quantum of fixed personality, some frozen energy of integrity.'

'Two very different teachers put the crazy notion into my head that the daughter of an Irish labourer and a servant could, and should, write books.'

'All of my reasons are personal, and selfish. It's absorbing, challenging and so on. It also sounds cool, and there's the undeniable freedom that comes with, let's not call it unemployment.'

'What made my admiration of Alan Plater complete was that there were a number of years when both he and I served on the Executive Council of the Writers' Guild.'

'Ted Hughes went on to stress how important it was to keep my creative energies at top pressure by living a bit uncomfortably, with a final dependence on writing.'

'I lie silently as the last dregs of my once transcendent seriousness drain away. What I'm mostly feeling now is lonely.'

'The truth is that this ageing RLF Fellow is not much surer why he does it than was the poetry-writing seven year old he used to be.'

'If I move to my laptop too soon I find it cuts off experiment and somehow 'sets' the poem in a way that makes if harder to make fundamental changes.'