Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.

You did not so much mind being -conventionally- betrayed, if you were not kept in the dark, which was humiliating, or defined only as a wife and dependent person, which was annihilating.

I don't think it is an easy thing to write and expect to be commercial, even if you are from Venus and a hermaphrodite.

Everything is surprising, rightly seen.

Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.... storytelling is intrinsic to biological time, which we cannot escape. Life, Pascal said, is like living in a prison from which every day fellow prisoners are taken away to be executed. We are all, like Scheherazade, under sentence of death, and we all think of our lives as narratives, with beginnings, middles and ends.

I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.

Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History.