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.

Don't romanticise your 'vocation.' You can either write good sentences or you can't. There is no 'writer's lifestyle.' All that matters is what you leave on the page.

Yet a world in which no one, from policymakers to adolescents, can imagine themselves as abject corpses – a world consisting only of thrusting, vigorous men walking boldly out of frame – will surely prove a demented and difficult place in which to live. A world of illusion.

It’s a shadow life and after a while it gets to you. Nannies, assistants, agents, secretaries, mothers – women are used to it. Men have a lower tolerance.

I don’t keep any copies of my books in the house – they go to my mum’s flat. I don’t like them around.

The story was the price you paid for the rhythm.

I think I was strange to my mother and to my father, a changeling belonging to neither one of them, and although this is of course true of all children, in the end – we are not our parents and they are not us – my father’s children would have come to this knowledge with a certain slowness, over years... whereas I was born knowing it, I have always known it, it is a truth stamped all over my face.

My phone buzzed so frequently it seemed to have an animal life of its own.

War transforms its participants. What was once necessary appears inessential; what was taken for granted, unappreciated and abused now reveals itself to be central to our existence. Strange inversions proliferate.

He asked questions, he was interested and interesting, he rarely spoke of himself. He had a calm voice for the worst accidents and emergencies.