"People demand a lot of the justice system and they demand things that it can't deliver."

"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."

"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 as a writer to get a reasonable advance if I wanted to do fiction."

"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."

"But I can't bear it when somebody who some man made a pass at - to call that violence seems to me absurd and insulting to women who've really met violence, who've been raped or bashed."

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

"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 working in fiction... so I look back and I see that I consciously vacated the contested ground."

"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 saw how much women's behaviour contributed to what was wrong, we stopped being able to see ourselves purely as."

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

"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 material, if you like, not pretend that I'm doing it completely intellectually."

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

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

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

"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."

"I like poking my nose into other people's lives."

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

"I think writers are very anxious."

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