I don’t believe in adventure. Real life, for the overimaginative, is scary enough. Yet greed can overcome fear, even indolence, and having once tried Georgian food, I couldn’t forget it: hazelnuts and pomegranates, tarragon lemonade, pickled tree-buds, soupy mountain-dumplings.

The novelist and author on her holiday reading and being gastronomically ruined

Springtime can kill you, but autumn is worse. If one’s soul responds to nature – and, as Louis Armstrong said of jazz, if you have to ask what that means, you’ll never know – then its beauty is painful. Whatever TS Eliot thought (the poor man was wrong about so much), autumn is the most painful time of all.

On a visit to Russia, the novelist makes new intellectual friends and wants to cry as she sees so much beauty

I am a bad blogger. Actually, I'm no blogger at all; every word I have is currently being poured into either Twitter, my favourite waste of time (perfect for interrupters, perfect for chatty introverts, just...perfect) or my current, fifth, novel. And, secretly, into another secret book, which arose out of HINT something I've posted on this very website.

Perhaps careers offices have changed since the late Eighties. When I was at school, not one of the folders on display contained a single job I could imagine doing. Was this because it was a girls’ school, so, swotty and over-achieving as we strove to be, we were encouraged to do the less showy, more supportive, aspects of even the most demanding jobs: solicitors, not barristers; health visitors, not surgeons; primary school teachers, not professors; caterers, not chefs?

More than almost any other writer, she understands the currents beneath the surface. Who knew the human heart better?

Some people can juggle. I don't know why they want to, but they can. Others can dive, learn languages quickly, play the flute, walk into rooms without crashing into the doorframe