I could not stop talking because now I had started my story, it wanted to be finished. We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us.
If I can't write it would be as if I died.
The reason why I love people, and writing about them, is because they don't always respond with hate and anger. If they did I wouldn't have a story to tell. Who wants to know about someone who was brutalised and became brutal? I'm interested in the exceptions.
I'm always determined that as a novelist I'm going to go out there and research my characters very thoroughly before I start writing.
I write in the novel's afterword that our recent wars "finish not with victory or defeat but with a calendar draw-down date and a presumption that we shall never be reconciled with the enemy".
