What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude.

Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it. I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.

Africa is not a fun place, you know. A fun place is somewhere that lifts the spirits, that cossets the senses. I don't think that can be said of the Africa I traveled in.

I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world.

Horrible things happen all our lives; we all experience loss and death and trauma. Usually, most people, I think, we just get on with it. We don't have a whole soliloquy in the middle of something.

I'm not into these mollycoddled sorts of things; I like a bit of danger. I haven't got a death wish, but it makes things exciting, doesn't it?

Abortion does not just hurt women. Abortion hurts a family, and it has a domino effect of hurting those related and close to those families through the grief and reality of losing a child to abortion.

I have asked to have no funeral, and no memorial service. I hate other people's and would certainly not appreciate my own.