You cannot escape the fact that women mould your first five years, whether you like it or not. And I can't say I do like it very much.
I do not think writers ought ever to sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme, or something. If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge.
You know, when I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires.
There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.
They can't give a Nobel to someone who's dead so I think they were probably thinking they had better give it to me now before I popped off.
There's an unconscious bias in our society: girls are wonderful; boys are terrible. And to be a boy, or young man, growing up, having to listen to all this, it must be painful.
When I started, there were no big interviews, no television, no profiles and all that. The publishers were quite shockingly uncommercial, but they did look after their writers.
What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.
I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are equipped. Up there, there's a layer of people who run everything. But we - we're just peasants. We don't understand what's going on, and we can't do anything.