I'm very disturbed by violence against women when it is violence..

I think writers are very anxious..

It's disturbing at my age to look at a young woman's destructive behaviour and hear the echoes of it, of one's own destructiveness in youth..

It's a terrific privilege to be able to see into somebody else's life..

But I now think what I was doing, in a completely unconscious way, was getting off the turf where my husband and I might be rivals. We were both work….

To slide into the domed reading room at ten each morning, specially in summer, off the hot street outside, was a sensation as delicious as dropping i….

The only thing that I was equipped for with my very mediocre college Arts degree was to get a job in teaching..

Well, I'm at some kind of crossroads in my life and I don't know which way to take. It's not about money, I mean, because I'm established enough now ….

We were in a great, seething moment in the 1970s. There was a new Labour government and everything seemed full of hope... But, as we got older and we….

The rain began again. It fell heavily, easily, with no meaning or intention but the fulfilment of its own nature, which was to fall and fall..

I think some people wished I'd kept myself out of the book. But I kind of insist on it because I want the reader to share my engagement with the mate….

Tentatively I stood a great lump of wood on the chopping block and bought the axe down on it. It flew into two perfect halves. Such was my elation th….

Writers seem to me to be people who need to retire from social life and do a lot of thinking about what's happened - almost to calm themselves..

But there are some wounds that can never be healed..

On Melbourne summer mornings the green trams go rolling in stately progress down tunnels thick with leaves: the bright air carries along the avenue t….

That's one of the things I hope that the book can do, is to restore some dignity to Joe Cinque..

I suppose there must be idiots who dream of signing deals with publishers while fully intending to drink martinis in cool bars or ride around on skat….

And always Melbourne, Melbourne, Melbourne, over and over the same photo in glaring greens and reds, of a tram, huffy, blunderous, manoeuvring itself….

I'm full of restlessness. Not lonely, exactly - my head is racing with ideas. But it is that old treacherous feeling that real life is happening some….

Now, I - for several years while I was researching this book, I felt quite obsessed by thoughts about sentencing, punishment, how judges arrive at th….

At the time it seemed like a natural development of my interest in what was going on around me in society..