The proper way to understand any social system was to view it from above.

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.

I see disappointment as something small and aggregate rather than something unified or great. With a little effort, every failure can be turned into something good.

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

It is a mark of the depth of their wounding that they are pretending they suspected it all along. Everything that they have seen and been told about love so far has been an inside perspective, and they are not prepared for the crashing weight of this exclusion. It dawns on them now how much they never saw and how little they were wanted, and with this dawning comes a painful re-imagining of the self as peripheral, uninvited, and utterly minor.

Solitude is a condition best enjoyed in company.