Novels help us to resist the temptation to think of the past as deficient.

I'm delighted when people respond with passion and readily intensity to my work. Literature is not as the economist would put it a positional good; in other words, there is infinite space for good literature.

It wasn't torpor that kept her - she was often restless to the point of irritability. She simply liked to feel that she was prevented from leaving, that she was needed.

Oblivion seemed the only reasonable option.

At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.

These were everyday sounds magnified by darkness. And darkness was nothing - it was not a substance, it was not a presence, it was no more than an absence of light.

Novels without female characters were a lifeless desert.