Judges live with shadows behind them.

But there’s time yet. The old women of the tribe have almost always been the wiser. If they keep their marbles long enough. Old men forget – or tend to reminisce, and reminisce falsely and sententiously as a rule. We are often very silly in our middle years but we tend to improve.

If you’ve not been loved as a child, you don’t know how to love a child.

I can't write the same book over and over again... let it go, once it's gone!

If I've got one thing that I really believe about fiction and life, it's that there are no minor characters.

I longed from a tiny child to get away on my own. When I was five, I walked out along the sands from Redcar, nearly all the way to Hartlepool.

I knew I had a lot to say. Not politically - politics have always confused me - but perhaps spiritually.

In modern novels, there is no one I want to copy. My style 'is a poor thing, but it is my own.'

The best novel I wrote was one called 'Crusoe's Daughter,' which never won any prizes. But I was getting somewhere in that. I'm not sure I have in any of the others.

Stories of all lengths and depths come from different parts of the cave. For a novel, you must lay in mental, physical and spiritual provision as for a siege or for a time of hectic explosions, while a short story is, or can be, a steady, timed flame like the lighting of a blow lamp on a building site full of dry tinder.