The desire for self-expression afflicts people when they feel there is something of themselves which is not getting through to the outside world.

Yet this perhaps is what love does, or the memory of it; it sucks the life from the living, glorying body and leaves it, when love has gone, a shred, a simulacrum - dross, to be swept up from the factory floor, pitiful and dusty, useless... Do all men and women feel love before they die? This force, this source of light, that lies before the sun; glances off mountains and lakes, blinding and dazzling, on a Sunday afternoon; so brilliant you have to guard your soul, fold your arms to shield your heart from the very memory of it.

You will find that women who are pregnant often don't want to be and women who aren't desperately envy those who are. Labour wards are always full of very punitive people.

one learns best, and writes best, in a state of defiance.

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

The peculiar need to write is increased, it seems, rather than allayed with practice.

Ambition will, and should, always outstrip achievement.