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.

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.

There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.

She didn't like to be talked about. Equally, she didn't like not to be talked about, when the high-minded chatter rushed on as though she was not there. There was no pleasing her, in fact. She had the grace, even at eleven, to know there was no pleasing her. She thought a lot, analytically, about other people's feelings, and had only just begun to realize that this was not usual, and not reciprocated.

The more research you do, the more at ease you are in the world you're writing about. It doesn't encumber you, it makes you free.

What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.

Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.