To get this prize, I was required to talk about how important a particular European feminist woman writer had been to me. Now the truth was that I had never managed to finish this feminist writer’s book. It did not speak to me. It would have been a lie to claim that she had any major influence on my thinking. […] I could have said that this woman was important to me, and I could have talked the talk, and I could have been given the prize and a shiny present. But I didn’t.

But these days, if I have to choose between building my tennis résumé and building my family, I choose the latter.

No alcohol, sex or drugs while you are working. […] No going to London. […] No going anywhere else either.

I think I naturally felt like I needed to pull back, and maybe that’s one of the reasons why I decided to get pregnant then because I was 37, and I had Lukas at 38. So I have not been covering combat recently. I haven’t covered combat in a few years. I’ve been in South Sudan. I’ve been under fire. But I’m not like — it’s a very different time, also, in history. … Now I feel like I was very torn about not being in Mosul, but I didn’t go because I felt like it was extremely dangerous, and I just couldn’t do that to my family.

Don’t romanticise your “vocation”. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no “writer’s lifestyle”. All that matters is what you leave on the page.

Narcissism, solipsism.

Violent death. Death generally.

I feel almost certain I don't know them. It would be one of these types who dedicate their lives to the welfare of others, whereas the people I tend to know are people making stories out of the dramas of themselves.

Oblivious to the event or on the brink of a genuine religious conversion.

Reading quietly, in high grass, among loved ones (who are also quietly reading). Followed by a boozy lunch.