Harm can come about without will or action. But will and action can avert harm.

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

Things are not what they seem.

In my mind's eye Shakespeare is a huge, hot sea-beast, with fire in his veins and ice on his claws and inscrutable eyes, who looks like an inchoate hump under the encrustations of live barnacle-commentaries, limpets and trailing weeds.

When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.

In England, everyone believes if you think, then you don't feel. But all my novels are about joining together thinking and feeling.

We two remake our world by naming it / Together, knowing what words mean for us / And for the other for whom current coin / Is cold speech - but we say, the tree, the pool, / And see the fire in the air, the sun, our sun, / Anybody's sun, the world's sun, but here, now / Particularly our sun.