It's absolutely essential to my life. I don't know what I would do if I didn't write.

I very much like writing about homosexual relations. I don't quite know why. Perhaps it's because I feel there's still so much to be said about them.

I don't like slapdash careless prose, and if I saw myself doing it, I would give up writing altogether.

People are still being put into geriatric wards when they don't need it. They need treatment, not just being put into bed and fed.

The old detective story that's got a really complicated motive doesn't apply to mine.

Hugh Grant will always be associated with his scandal, and so will Max Mosley.

In judging other people's work, particularly short stories, I have noticed how novice writers tell the readers everything about their characters in the first paragraphs, disclose their motives, reveal their recent activities and their future intentions.

I go to the House of Lords in the afternoon and try to walk halfway. I may be thinking about what I'm going to write. It's much more satisfying than sitting in a chair.

Both my parents had strokes. My father had several, but the last one was fatal. It's a horribly disabling bug, a stroke.

I can't sum up my books. They're all rather complicated. Sometimes I think they're too complicated. But that's the way I am. When I start to write a book, my head gets full of all kinds of detail.

The treatment of patients with contaminated blood has been described as one of the most tragic episodes in the history of the NHS.

I'm not much of a shoe person, but I love a pair by Bruno Magli that I've had for 10 years.

Ford Maddox Ford's 'The Good Soldier' is my favourite novel. I first read it in the 1950s and have read it about 20 times since. It's possibly the best-constructed book in the English language.

It looks as if the NHS will gradually fade away, and we shall go back to a great deal of private medicine.

I don't have any dark desires. And I think most people don't. A few have dark desires and don't sublimate them.

I never was religious, really, but I'm very interested in religion.

Haemophilia itself is bad enough. It is disabling day by day, even if far less incapacitating than in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But the added burden of life-threatening further illnesses from contaminated NHS blood is far worse.

'The Chimney Sweeper's Boy' began differently from any previous book I'd written. It actually derives from a story a friend - the novel's dedicatee, Patrick Maher - told me.

The knives of jealousy are honed on details.

People want to marry me for companionship. No thanks! I've got my cats for that!

I'm very fond of Tennessee Williams' plays, and when my husband and I went to New Orleans in the late 1970s, we saw 'A Street Car Named Desire.'

What I mind in modern society very much is the awful lack of grammar.

I never make notes; just a few small details when I'm writing, but nothing much. The plot is never written down. I will tell the story to myself, but I won't plan it. I'll speak the narrative in my head for a while.

I agree with what Mark Twain said - we're all mad at night.