SARAH WATERS

I wouldn't mind being a fly on the wall in a few Victorian parlours.

I like dramas because there's a big overlap between film and fiction, so I feel relatively qualified to talk about plot and characterisation and that sort of thing.

I was encouraged to be imaginative and read, and it was a great childhood for a budding writer because I had the time and the freedom to go into a world of my own.

My story is the story of many postwar British families. Upward mobility. A council house and then new affluence.

I've ended up feeling fonder of 'The Paying Guests' than of any of my other novels.

Ours is a world which feels so unsettled and dangerous in large ways, whether it's terrorism or global financial meltdown or climate change - huge things that affect us deeply, and yet things about which we can do, individually, very little.

The early '20s were like the waist of an hourglass. Lots of things were hurtling toward it and squeezing through it and then hurtling out the other side.

The relationship you have with your mother is like nothing else. They do kind of know everything about you, even though they don't confront it. That is often a dynamic from childhood onwards. As a teenager, you want to be independent and do slightly furtive things.

I used to hate flying. I would sit there, rigid, convinced that if I relaxed, the plane would drop out of the sky.

I've never managed to get very far with Henry James.

My nan was a nursery maid. Most people weren't in big houses. They were maids of all work.

I was mad about the theatre growing up, really mad. We had a local theatre, the Torch, and I used to usher there. I would see the shows over and over again.

All I can do is write about whatever grabs me.

I do love the past but wouldn't want to live in it.

I knew I'd always be a second-rate academic, and I thought, 'Well, I'd rather be a second-rate novelist or even a third-rate one'.

I love film and, particularly, shorts. You don't get to see them often, and they're a great little form, like a short story.

I never expected my books to do even as well as they have. I still feel grateful for it, every single day.

I used to write at home, but it didn't ever occur to me to be a writer.

I'm interested in stories that aren't getting told: it's where my interests lie.

It was a great childhood. We weren't especially wealthy or anything, but I felt I had a kind of safety and freedom.

My parents were the first in our family to go to grammar school. My grandparents were in service.

Sometimes I think I'd be perfectly happy to go on rewriting 'Tipping the Velvet' forever because it was so much fun.

I love research. Sometimes I think writing novels is just an excuse to allow myself this leisurely time of getting to know a period and reading its books and watching its films. I see it as a real treat.

Novels are nothing but evolution, but there does come a point when that stops, and the story is sealed within the pages of the book. That doesn't happen with a play. Even performances are different every night.

People say, 'You're like Dickens', but I'm not like Dickens. Zadie Smith is a Dickensian writer because she's writing about society now, just as Dickens was writing about his society.