Maria McCann

'How will nature writing change now, along with our lives? I've been thinking about the Romantic concept of the sublime and how it connotes terror as well as beauty. I didn't understand how this combination could exist until I saw footage of a tsunami.'

'Even the fiercest, toughest girls responded to your unfeigned kindliness, your motherly affection. There’s sadness in remembering that, because I see how much you would have liked children. I don’t know if you realised how important you were. '

'My friend’s untimely death galvanised me: I went on an Arvon course, primed by the book she had told me to read, my head stuffed with the English Civil War. As I sat at Lumb Bank, I saw a man sailing away from England. He trailed destruction... '

'The disaster of Mum's dementia was aggravated by the death of a beloved dog, and a love affair that soured. Being placed as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow was a joy, but overall, there was simply too much going wrong.'

'It seems I share the writing fetishes of several people. I conclude, that I'm unusually neurotic and pervy, which may be why I'm vulnerable to writer's block. Perhaps, if you have lots of rituals you make yourself vulnerable?'

'If we take 'playing God' to mean controlling, shaping, balancing, fore-knowing outcomes, rendering meaningful the sprawling chaos and occasional carnage of life ; yes I do those intensely enjoyable things. '

'I'm inspired by novelists who reveal the extraordinary in what are patronisingly called 'everyday people'; that refusal to confine interest to life's winners... in Carter's work, and in Mantel's.'

'Even now I have a fatal tendency to just open a fresh page and go. Interesting things happen that way but you also get lots of false starts.'

'When I simply consumed books with no aspiration to write one, every novel was a plus. It existed only to give me joy and if it failed there were plenty others.'

'Each time I return to Middlemarch l find it has changed; on first reading it was the story of Dorothea, nowadays she has to share my interest with less glamorous characters.'

'Writing, to you, is an enchanted pool; you hover round the edges admiring the grace of the swimmers, but you don't plunge in. '

'There's a Library Shelf in the living room where all the through-traffic is stored; library books, obviously, plus books borrowed from friends and books I think friends might like to borrow.'