I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.

On buses and trains, I always think about the inexhaustible variety of human genes. We see types, and occasionally twins, but never doubles. All faces are unique, and this is exhilarating, despite the increasingly plastic similarity of TV stars and actors.

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

I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.

Outside our small safe place flies mystery.

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.

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