I am a profound pessimist both about life and about human relations and about politics and ecology. Humans are inadequate and stupid creatures who sooner or later make a mess, and those who are trying to do good do a lot more damage than those who are muddling along.

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.

I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.

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.

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

Once you get older, people stop listening to what you say. It's very agreeable once you get used to it.

Coherence and closure are deep human desires that are presently unfashionable. But they are always both frightening and enchantingly desirable. "Falling in love," characteristically, combs the appearances of the word, and of the particular lover's history, out of a random tangle and into a coherent plot.