Has some fowl played a part in your ancestry?

He’ll not confess he knew, in the end, that the drama of death does not come into it – that some pain’s too dull to be worthy of a romantic shroud. Courage could have brushed glamour over what little there was, but courage is ridiculous when the other person doesn’t want to know.

A person’s life isn’t orderly... it runs about all over the place, in and out through time. The present’s hardly there; the future doesn’t exist. Only love matters in the bits and pieces of a person’s life.

All this occupied his thoughts when he revisited the places of his war. Tramping over soil fed by the blood of men he had led and whose faces now stirred in his memory, it was his wife’s response that came – as if in compensation for too little said before – when he wondered why his wandering had led him back to these old battlefields: in his sixty-ninth year he was establishing his survivor’s status.

There is an element of autobiography in all fiction in that pain or distress, or pleasure, is based on the author’s own. But in my case that is as far as it goes.

She is embarrassed to be alive and no one on earth can fully console her.

The capacity you’re thinking of is imagination; without it there can be no understanding, indeed no fiction.

By the end, you should be inside your character, actually operating from within somebody else, and knowing him pretty well, as that person knows himself or herself. You’re sort of a predator, an invader of people.

I value mothers and motherhood enormously. For every inattentive or abusive mother in my fiction I think you’ll find a dozen or so who are neither.

Memories can be everything if we choose to make them so. But you are right: you mustn’t do that. That is for me, and I shall do it.