In England, everyone believes if you think, then you don't feel. But all my novels are about joining together thinking and feeling.

Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.

Do I do as false prophets do and puff air into simulacra? Am I a Sorcerer--like Macbeth's witches--mixing truth and lies in incandescent shapes? Or am I a kind of very minor scribe of a prophetic Book--telling such truth as in me lies, with aid of such fiction as I acknowledge mine, as Prospero acknowledged Caliban.

Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.

Everything is surprising, rightly seen.

I grew up with that completely fictive idea of motherhood, where the mother never strayed from the kitchen. All the women in my books are very afraid that if they do anything with their minds they won't be complete women. I don't think my daughters' generation has that feeling.

Things are not what they seem.