Scars heal,” Sylvie said. “Even the worst ones.

Because I write fiction, I don't write autobiography, and to me they are very different things. The first-person narrative is a very intimate thing, but you are not addressing other people as 'I' - you are inhabiting that 'I.'

Ethics are not necessarily to do with being law-abiding. I am very interested in the moral path, doing the right thing.

Small boys were a mystery to Sylvie. The satisfaction they gained from throwing sticks or stones for hours on end, the obsessive collection of inanimate objects, the brutal destruction of the fragile world around them, all seemed at odds with the men they were supposed to become.

Teddy thought of his wife and his sister as two sides of the same shining coin. Nancy was an idealist, Ursula a realist; Nancy an optimist with a lively heart, while Ursula’s spirit was freighted with the grief of history. Ursula was forever cast out of Eden and making the best of it while Nancy, cheerful and undaunted, was sure her search for the gate back into the garden would be successful.

I usually start writing a novel that I then abandon. When I say abandon, I don't think any writer ever abandons anything that they regard as even a half-good sentence. So you recycle. I mean, I can hang on to a sentence for several years and then put it into a book that's completely different from the one it started in.