“I should like to elbow aside the established pieties and raise my martini glass in salute to the mortal arts of pleasure.”

I love research – that’s all the fun, especially in the field. To write, however, is to suffer, and my pieces usually come in thousands of words over the assigned length. That’s a serious flaw in my writing process – shaping and disciplining the footlockers of material one has so happily gathered.

For any artistic person who creates imaginary people, the art is like inhabiting the life and mind of a seven-year-old child with imaginary friends and imaginary events and imaginary grace and imaginary tragedy.

It is no secret that souls sometimes die in a person and are replaced by others.

I actually had the urge to elbow an elderly lady today.

It’s in the kitchen that confidences are exchanged, that family life takes place; it’s among the remains of a meal or when your’re elbow-deep in peelings that you ask yourself what life is all about, rather than when you’re sunk in an armchair in the sitting room.