I loathe crowds. I especially don't like cities. A city involves biomass. And biomass gets to me.

To be far from the madding crowd is to be mad indeed.

My feeling is that writing is, for me, a pathological condition. That could sound like a mystical experience, and it may be a mystical experience, but I have learnt just to go with it.

When distance and convenience sets in; the small, the various and the personal wither away.

My mother read nursery rhymes to me, and my grandmother told me folk stories, but as a child I had no interest in writing whatsoever.

I don't think I've ever frightened myself before when writing, but there were areas where there was terror, as though I was looking into somewhere that I didn't know existed before, and it frightened me.