'Death, money, cooking, school assemblies, blog posts, twitter; I'd rather you went on enjoying the benign neglect which lets you just get on with things.'

'I was a schoolgirl reading my mother's Nova, excited by the second wave of feminism which looked to the past as well as to the future.'

'He is too clever, really, to be an effective novelist. Essays are what he is good at; you can't be too clever for them.'

'When things are going badly; don't quit, rewrite. Always carry a notebook. Above all, be persistent, if it's going to be good it's not going to be easy.'

'Everything in his plays is stripped down to it's minimum, and yet his thematic and emotional reach is so vast. His later plays have an extraordinary intimacy.'

'Co-writing suits me because it breaks the isolation of writing alone, and it divides the writing process into manageable chunks.'

'I wish that I could say I took it on the chin, but I was rather protective and sensitive about my work in those days. '

'A new feeling emerges, a desire to bear witness to the dignity and passion of our human lives. To write with as much simple presence and transparency as possible.'

'You see you just didn't talk back then about your feelings; you swallowed them down and you got on with your 'O' Levels. So I turned to books.'

'There are a number of ways a poem can happen. Sometimes there are those rare occasions when the poem arrives fully formed and just needs its tie straightening, so to speak.'