I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful.

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

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

Independent women must expect more of themselves, since neither men nor other more conventionally domesticated women will hope for anything, or expect any result other than utter failure.

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.

A beautiful woman, Simone Weil said, seeing herself in the mirror, knows "This is I." An ugly woman knows with equal certainty, "This is not I." Maud knew this neat division represented an over-simplification. The doll-mask she saw had nothing to do with her, nothing.

The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended.