I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the second world war.

As a little girl, I didn't like stories about little girls. I liked stories about dragons and beasts and princes and princesses and fear and terror and the Four Musketeers and almost anything other than nice little girls making moral decisions about whether to tell the teacher about what the other little girl did or did not do.

Books that change you, even later in life, give you a kind of electrical shock as the world takes a different shape.

There are many ways of writing badly about painting... There is an 'appreciative' language of threadbare, not inaccurate, but overexposed and irritating words... the language of the schools which 'situates' works and artists in schools and movements... novelists and poets [that] see paintings as allegories of writing.

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.

An odd phrase, "by heart," he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.

I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.