Poverty is a stubborn thing: you seldom escape it with one bound.

Poetry, I thought then, and still do, is a matter of space on the page interrupted by a few well-chosen words, to give them importance. Prose is a less grand affair which has to stretch to the edges of the page to be convincing.

I have never got on with the quietist movements: they lapse too easily into self-congratulations: I have found the oneness, you have not. I prefer to look outside myself if I possibly can, not inside. Meditation reminds me too forcibly of being made to lie on a mat at nursery school and take an hour's nap.

Style is what's there when you look at someone's writing and you know that they wrote it and nobody else did.

All mothers love their own children as best they can, according to their temperament and circumstances, and all mothers should have done better, in their children's eyes, when the going gets tough for the children.

As it has turned out, the whole relationship between men, women and children has tilted, to the disadvantage of women.

Fiction stretches our sensibilities and our understanding, as mere information never can.