To experience sublime natural beauty is to confront the total inadequacy of language to describe what you see. Words cannot convey the scale of a view that is so stunning it is felt.

A man ought never to trust another mans evaluation of a third mans disposition.

I really wanted to write an adventure story, a murder-mystery that was set during the gold-rush years in New Zealand.

All men want their whores to be unhappy.

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.

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

Remember that anybody who is clever enough to set you free is clever enough to enslave you.