Born on August 24th

"The more research you do, the more at ease you are in the world you're writing about. It doesn't encumber you, it makes you free."

"I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the Second World War."

"I watch a lot of sport on television. I only watch certain sports, and I only watch them live - I don't think I've ever been able to watch a replay of a match or game of which the result was already decided. I feel bound to cheat and look up what can be looked up."

"A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children. Sadly, being taught literature often destroys the life of the books."

"On buses and trains, I always think about the inexhaustible variety of human genes. We see types, and occasionally twins, but never doubles. All faces are unique, and this is exhilarating, despite the increasingly plastic similarity of TV stars and actors."

"I always say I write my own novels and the characters don't take control of me, but in fact, I look at the characters in the early stages and I think, 'What is he or she like,' and they slowly come together and they become the person they are."

"Books that change you, even later in life, give you a kind of electrical shock as the world takes a different shape."

"You learn a lot about love before you ever get there. You learn at least as much about love from books as you do from watching your parents."

"Reading a newspaper is like reading someone's letters, as opposed to a biography or a history. The writer really does not know what will happen. A novelist needs to feel what that is like."

"I know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I'm ill is that there is an almost total absence of sexuality in his world, which is restful."

"America is full of readers of all different sorts who love books in many different ways, and I keep meeting them. And I think editors should look after them, and make less effort to please people who don't actually like books."

"In our world of sleek flesh and collagen, Botox and liposuction, what we most fear is the dissolution of the body-mind, the death of the brain."

"What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude."

"It's a terrible poison, writing."

"I have never been able to read Agatha Christie - the pleasure is purely in the puzzle, and the reader is toyed with by someone who didn't decide herself who the killer was until the end of the writing."

"It's because I'm a feminist that I can't stand women limiting other women's imaginations. It really makes me angry."

"There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader."

"I find the attempt to find things out, which scientists are possessed by, to be as human as breathing, or feeding, or sex. And so the science has to be in the novels as science and not just as metaphors."

"You learn different things through fiction. Historians are always making a plot about how certain things came to happen. Whereas a novelist looks at tiny little things and builds up a sort of map, like a painting, so that you see the shapes of things."

"I'm quite interested in my own mental processes, simply because I'm a failed scientist, and because I'm interested in how the brain and the mind works, and I like to avoid easy descriptions."

"I think my characters with my fingers, I think my characters with my guts. But when I say I think them, that is what I do, I feel them with the sympathetic neurons and I work out with my brain what it is that I am trying to write about, or I can't do it."

"I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity. If you look really hard at almost anybody, and try to see why they're doing what they're doing, taking a dig at them ceases to be what you want to do even if you hate them."

"I don't only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants."

"When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life."

"I grew up with that completely fictive idea of motherhood, where the mother never strayed from the kitchen. All the women in my books are very afraid that if they do anything with their minds they won't be complete women. I don't think my daughters' generation has that feeling."

"I don't think it is an easy thing to write and expect to be commercial, even if you are from Venus and a hermaphrodite."

"I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me, but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is."

"I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically."

"You can understand a lot about yourself by working out which fairytale you use to present your world to yourself in."

"For a long time, I felt instinctively irritated - sometimes repelled - by scientific friends' automatic use of the word 'mechanism' for automatic bodily processes. A machine was man-made; it was not a sentient being; a man was not a machine."