Young girls are sad. They like to be; it makes them feel strong.

You are safe with me." "I am not at all safe, with you. But I have no desire to be elsewhere.

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.

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

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

A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children.

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.