Pain hardens, and great pain hardens greatly, whatever the comforters say, and suffering does not ennoble, though it may occasionally lend a certain rigid dignity of manner to the suffering frame.

I was no good at being a child.

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

I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.

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

There are things that happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken or written of, though it would be very wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such things had never been.

History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself.