When I sit down at my writing desk, time seems to vanish. I think it's a wonderful way to spend one's life.

I write slowly by hand. Publishing is effectively bankrupt for you unless you are Danielle Steele. It takes a year to write book and advances are going down or disappearing.

Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.

Nothing you write is ever lost to you. At some other level your mind is working on it.

Why does life need evidence of life?

If sex and creativity are often seen by dictators as subversive activities, it's because they lead to the knowledge that you own your own body (and with it your own voice), and that's the most revolutionary insight of all.

What a damnably lonely profession writing is! In order to do it, one must banish the world, and having banished it, one feels cosmically alone.