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The great thing about being a novelist is that you organize your own day.

I love research. Sometimes I think writing novels is just an excuse to allow myself this leisurely time of getting to know a period and reading its books and watching its films. I see it as a real treat.

I can't inhabit my characters until I know what kind of work they do. This requires research because my jobs for the last decade have been author and professor, and I'd like to spare the world more author or professor novels.

Novels for me are how I find out what's going on in my own head. And so that's a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do.

I wasn't taking myself seriously as a novelist, and then it became my day job.

I obviously prefer writing novels but I take my journalism very seriously, and I enjoy doing it between novels. It gives me an opportunity to move in the outside world.

I'm a novelist, and I'm a woman, and I'm considered to be a serious author whether I like it or not.

Novelists seem to fall into two distinct categories - those that plan and those that just see where it takes them. I am very much the former category.