I am rather proud of my modest contribution to bringing democracy home.

European civil society and NGOs that petition for favours and influence for their special interests are often themselves funded from E.U. coffers. This creates a system of patronage that encourages self-reinforcing group-think and a cloying sycophancy.

It has to be said that one of the most impressive aspects of the parliament are the brilliant unsung translators, who ensure that whatever language you speak, you are understood.

One thing we can be sure of is that Brexit will leave its mark on the E.U.

I confess I had butterflies doing the first BBC 'Politics Live' of 2020. It felt like the first day back at school.

Constantly referring to past wrongdoings can become a substitute for developing a deeper analysis of today's foreign-policy challenges, of understanding what is new and different.

Sloganeering and name-calling have been some of the most unsavoury aspects of Leave/Remain conflicts over the past few years.

For many Leavers, having been demonised in the vilest terms as racists, stupid and worse, it is hard to simply employ a hug-a-Remainer approach.

You see, Leavers desperately need a psychological win. We need to feel our vote for change can actually change things.

Left to their own devices, the Tories will squash the life out of what Brexit really represents in terms of the chance to shake up political life and overturn a complacent status quo. We cannot let that happen.

Senior Tories have exhibited a brand of entitled arrogance that implies that they own Brexit. It seems that anyone else who claims its mantle can be pushed to one side. And that includes voters.

The paternalism of the Conservative party is breathtaking.

Some who campaign against hate, seem to hate the Brexit party more than they love peace.

Democrats need to value free speech and we should not be intimidated into giving an inch of it away.

I digress a lot - it's how I experience the world. I would like to write in a way that will convey that to the reader, but also I need clarity.

What is the truth? Is it what you experience? Is it what I experience? Or is there some objective truth in between?

Obstruction can be caused by so many factors - perfectionism, distraction, faltering confidence, external demands and pressures. At some point, of course, you've got to push through it all if you're to write, and if you don't, or can't, you're sunk.

The fictional narratives that television, film, and the news provide for girls and young women are appalling.

Everybody's always living in fiction just as much as children, but the way our stories are faked is curtailed by all sorts of narratives we take into our own lives about what are the true narratives and what's not.

We read to find life, in all its possibilities.

Awards bolster your confidence in wonderful ways. But they aren't the world.

I had a memory span about as long as the lines in a school play.

I remember going to a son's friend's bar mitzvah, and the text that he chose to explicate was right at the beginning of Genesis. It was not about a fall from grace or a fall from perfection; it was about an awakening into consciousness, which is what it means to be human.

I went around in my teens and early 20s thinking that life was a con trick. I had managed to grow up believing in all sorts of romantic ideas about hard work and justice and truth, and it seemed the real world was much more complicated and shaded than I wanted to believe.

I'm not a writing group member, not a joiner in that way. I don't seek a wide swath of feedback.

Yes, writing is essential to me. It's my way of living in the world.

I believe that, in an ideal world, writers would feel free to write what matters to them without having to consider success, failure, the market, etc.

The effort to create a work of art that is true and potentially lasting, that is the very best work of art you can create at that point in your life - a book that may only reach or move a few people but will seem to those people somehow transformative. That's the ideal; that's always the motivation.

The more accurately one can illuminate a particular human experience, the better the work of art.

As any of us approaches middle age, we inevitably come up against our limitations: the realization that certain dearly-held fantasies may not be realized; that circumstances have thwarted us; that even with intention and will we may not be able to set our ship back on the course we'd planned.

If I had to summarize, most broadly, my concerns as a writer, I'd say the question 'How then must we live?' is at the heart of it, for me.

I wanted to write a voice that for me, as a reader, had been missing from the chorus: the voice of an angry woman.

An abiding preoccupation for me is how much of our lives are invisible and unknown by other people, like the Chekhov story 'The Lady With the Little Dog.'

As a reader since very early, I have found myself drawn to rants.

I was in my senior year of high school when I read 'Notes From Underground' by Dostoyevsky, and it was an exhilarating discovery. I hadn't known up until that moment that fiction could be like that. Fiction could say these things, could be unseemly, could be unsettling and distressing in that particular way, that immediate and urgent way.

For many of us, we set out thinking there will be time in the future, and then suddenly we find ourselves at a moment when we have to acknowledge that the future isn't infinite.

My mother turned 40 in 1973. So in 1970 - when 'The Female Eunuch' came out and Ms. magazine was founded - my mom was 37 with two children, and she was just that little bit too old, and the circumstances of her life were set up in a certain way that for her to fulfill her ambitions and dreams, she would have had to break with the family.

I feel as though there's a lot invested in my background in being an outsider.

There is that time right around 30 when you think, your twenties have gone by, and now you really are a grown up, and you do have to figure out what you're going to do.

I feel as though there are things that I'm trying to do - you know, capturing truthfully some aspect of human experience - and I'm trying really hard not to be fake. And in writing, as in life, it's harder than you think.

My tendencies are much more the Henry James thing, where we sit in silence at the table for three minutes, and our whole lives are changed because of a revelation that never quite happens but almost bubbles to the surface.

Don't go around asking the question, 'Is this character likeable?' and expect that to be compatible with serious literary endeavours. That's not what it's about.

My husband had a stalker, briefly.

We're all living in some state of illusion, even if modestly.

I still believe on some level that at the end, somebody will say, 'You get an A-minus for your life.' And it's not true. It's not true.

If you know what you're doing, it's not interesting. It has to be a challenge; it has to seem impossible and urgent to do it. And then you do it.

We live in a culture that wants to put a redemptive face on everything, so anger doesn't sit well with any of us. But I think women's anger sits less well than anything else.

Women's anger is very scary to people, and to no one more than to other women, who think, 'My goodness, if I let the lid off, where would we be?'

I'd wish for my work to be remembered rather than myself.

In a globalised world, so many of us move around so much. You lose things, but you also gain things - or hope to gain them.