I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.

Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.

Don't you find it rather heavy, to have everything really in front of you – all the people who are going to matter, whom you haven't met yet, all the choices you are going to have to make, everything you might achieve, and all the possible failures – unreal now? The future flaps round my head like a cloud of midges.

You can understand a lot about yourself by working out which fairytale you use to present your world to yourself in.

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

Where would we be without inhibitions? Theyre quite useful things when you look at some of the things humans do if they lose them.

I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.