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I admire Virginia Woolf so much that I wonder why I don't like her more. She makes the inner things real, she does illumine, and she makes relationships realities as well as people. But I remember the intensity, the thrill, with which I read 'Passage to India.' How I would have hated anyone who took the book away from me.

I'd studied English literature at university, but I was also far more enamored with Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and James Joyce. That was my passion.

I love reading other people's diaries, especially someone like Virginia Woolf's - such a formidable woman that it's a revelation when she shows you a more vulnerable side of herself.

Virginia Woolf's great novel, 'Mrs. Dalloway,' is the first great book I ever read. I read it almost by accident when I was in high school, when I was 15 years old.

In school, I was Martha in 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' I loved that.

Margot Livesey, my dear friend, reads all the drafts of what I write, and I read hers. We have an intense working relationship. I've been really lucky to know her. She's a great reader and teacher as well as an astonishingly good writer.

'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' is, to my mind, a work of perfect genius.

I grew up reading - and loving - stories by Andre Norton. I admired and idolised her from afar. Her stories helped shape my own internal world.

Love of place is one of the characteristics I enjoy most about novelists.

I was fortunate enough to write about things I really love, and love can be very analytic.