It's true that misunderstanding and lack of understanding are often themes in my fiction, but I am grateful for the moments when true understanding is achieved, especially between writer and reader. It's miraculous.

The idea that somehow the way forward is to abandon the past, to me, is preposterous and both undesirable and unrealistic.

When I act as a translator, I am really doing a performance for my fellow Anglophone readers in the West.

I still think in a parallel universe, I became a mathematician.

So we've moved from an era when women's biology was women's destiny to today, which is an era in which men's biology is men's destiny.

Our annual school physics trip was always to Blackpool Pleasure Beach, as it's such a good example of Newtonian physics. You can learn about centrifugal force and Newton's first law from the roller coasters, and the Viking long boat is a giant pendulum. It's good for children to understand that science underpins all these brilliant things.

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

Legal discrimination between the sexes is, in almost every instance, founded on outmoded views of society and the pre-scientific beliefs about psychology and physiology. It is time to sweep away these relics of the past and set further generations free of them.