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.

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

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

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

I don't like gurus. I don't like people who ask you to follow or believe. I like people who ask you to think independently.

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

I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.