Sometimes, walking with a friend, I forget the world.

…I go through a story for lies. I might discover the lie of trying to show off. Sometimes they’re lies of character. Sometimes they are lies of writing the most beautiful sentence in the world that has nothing to do with the story.

I have a basic indolence about me which is essential to writing. ... It's thinking time, it's hanging-out time, it's daydreaming time. You know, it's lie-around-the-bed time, it's sitting-like-a-dope-in-your-chair time. And that seems to me essential to any work.

If you're feminist, it means that you've noticed that male ownership of the direction of female lives has been the order of the day for a few thousand years, and it isn't natural.

I was a fantastic student until ten, and then my mind began to wander.

I read a lot. I liked a tremendous number of poets and writers. The person whose work I liked the most was Joyce.

You come to doing what you do by not being able to do something.