The minds of stone lovers had colonised stones as lichens clung to them with golden or grey-green florid stains. The human world of stones is caught in organic metaphors like flies in amber. Words came from flesh and hair and plants. Reniform, mammilated, botryoidal, dendrite, haematite. Carnelian is from carnal, from flesh. Serpentine and lizardite are stone reptiles ; phyllite is leafy-green.

You did not so much mind being -conventionally- betrayed, if you were not kept in the dark, which was humiliating, or defined only as a wife and dependent person, which was annihilating.

I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)

Outside our small safe place flies mystery.

I don't only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.

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

It is good for a man to invite his ghosts into his warm interior, out of the wild night, into the firelight, out of the howling dark.