The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise . . . but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us - for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.

I write because I've always written, can't stop. I am a writing animal. The way a silk worm is a silk-producing animal.

There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.

I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I've been much happier unmarried than married.

In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.

For with my intuition I knew that this man was repeating a pattern over and over again: courting a woman with his intelligence and sympathy, claiming her emotionally; then, when she began to claim in return, running away. And the better a woman was, the sooner he would begin to run. I knew this with my intuition, and yet I sat there in my dark room, looking at the hazed wet brilliance of the purple London night sky, longing with my whole being.

You have to be grown up, really grown up, not merely in years, to understand your parents.