...in their millenial and long-lived patience they knew quite well how, in a hundred years, or a thousand years' time, or else, perhaps, tomorrow, in an hour's time, for it was all a gamble, a million to one chance, but all the same there was a chance that if they kept on shaking their chains, one day, some day, the clasps upon the shackles would part.

What a joy it is to dance and sing!

Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.

It is, perhaps, a better thing to be valued only as an object of passion than never to be valued at all.

There are lots of things that you can brush under the carpet about yourself until you're faced with somebody whose needs won't be put off.

It may be the first in what I trust will be a rapidly growing and influential genre--the novel designed on purpose to be excludedfrom the Booker short-list.

Love is desire sustained by unfulfilment.