When I was thin, I had no notion of what being fat is like. When I worked in a department store, I had sold clothes to women of most sizes, so I should have known; but perhaps you have to experience the state from the inside, to understand what fat is like.

When I began to read as an adult, I read almost exclusively novelists of a generation back. I did the Russians, then I started getting more up to date. When you become published and become a reviewer, piles of books come along and you are pushed by fashion and what you are commissioned to do.

I spend a lot of my time talking to the dead, but since I get paid for it, no one thinks I'm mad.

It's not easy to diagnose because depending where the endometrial deposits are, the symptoms can be quite different. It's an unrecognized problem among teenage girls, and it's something that every young woman who has painful menstruation should be aware of... It's a condition that is curable if it's caught early. If not, if it's allowed to run on, it can cause infertility, and it can really, really mess up your life.

Fortitude. ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.

You don't get on by being original. You don't get on by being bright. You don't get on by being strong. You get on by being a subtle crook.

Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried.