Middle age: when you begin to exchange your emotions for symptoms.

Brain power improves by brain use, just as our bodily strength grows with exercise. And there is no doubt that a large proportion of the female population, from school days to late middle age, now have very complicated lives indeed.

I began to understand my sensations, to know what I wanted, at around the age of forty - but only vaguely.

I grew up on a farm in a small town where you do or say one thing and everybody knows about it. You see it happen, there's always the town gossip - 'Oh did you hear about so and so, or did you hear what went on in this household?' So I learned at a very young age just to keep my mouth shut.

If you love somebody, you love them. My parents had a 25-year age gap between them and my mum was the breadwinner, my dad the house husband. I'm a strong believer that a good relationship can work, whatever the situation.

The Border Ballads, for instance, and the Robin Hood Ballads, clearly suppose a state of society which is nothing but a very circumscribed and not very important heroic age.

By the age of 9 or 10, I knew that I had to cut my own cloth and make my own way.

When you're my age and you see a story, you better go for it pretty quickly. I'd just like to get a few more novels under my belt.

Catholics and evangelicals need to remain allied, and in solidarity, against the increasingly aggressive secularism of our age.

I don't know whether it's age or maturity, but I certainly find myself committed more and more to the looser forms of Western democracy at any price.