Never underestimate how extraordinarily difficult it is to understand a situation from another person's point of view.

Theatre is a concentrate of life as normal. Theatre is a purified version of real life, an extraction, an essence of human behaviour that is stranger and more tragic and more perfect than everything that is ordinary about me and you.

The way that I see astrology is as a repository of thought and psychology. A system we've created as a culture as way to make things mean things.

I often feel intellectually frustrated when I'm in a position where I'm not moving forward; when I'm not enquiring about something.

I have observed that male writers tend to get asked what they think and women what they feel," she says. "In my experience, and that of a lot of other women writers, all of the questions coming at them from interviewers tend to be about how lucky they are to be where they are – about luck and identity and how the idea struck them. The interviews much more seldom engage with the woman as a serious thinker, a philosopher, as a person with preoccupations that are going to sustain them for their lifetime.

It is a feature of human nature to give what we most wish to receive.

Reason is no match for desire: when desire is purely and powerfully felt, it becomes a kind of reason of its own.