"[Asked "Why do you write?"] A combination of a desire to communicate, and a passionate belief in the power of story t…"

"The comparison to Jane Austen makes me fidget. There is a huge gulf between being great and being good. I know exactl…"

"In ordinary life [...] if we're in love, we still have to go and see old aunts in nursing homes, take the children to…"

"I was born into the Church of England, I'm still in it, and I go to church. It's as natural to me as breathing - you …"

"All the middle-class people I write about would have had nannies and servants in the past, but now we do everything o…"

"I'm no lyrical stylist, you wouldn't pick me for a perfect sentence, and I certainly wouldn't describe my novels as i…"

"I've done the countryside for decades. The last dog went to paradise in the summer, dear old boy. So it's just me now…"

"Oh I admire untidiness so much. There's something in the emotional carelessness, the freedom of it, that I quietly ap…"

"What I'm trying to do in all these novels is mirror a contemporary preoccupation. I'm not providing any solutions. I'…"

"I wanted to write a novel about the sandwich generation: parents falling to pieces at one end of your life and childr…"