It's because I'm a feminist that I can't stand women limiting other women's imaginations. It really makes me angry.

You are safe with me." "I am not at all safe, with you. But I have no desire to be elsewhere.

The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended.

I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.

I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.

I grew up with that completely fictive idea of motherhood, where the mother never strayed from the kitchen. All the women in my books are very afraid that if they do anything with their minds they won't be complete women. I don't think my daughters' generation has that feeling.

Our days weave together the simple pleasures of daily life, which we should never take for granted, and the higher pleasures of Art and Thought which we may now taste as we please, with none to forbid or criticise.