I am getting much more political as I get older. It's the duty of any writer, in particular, not to stand back from the world.

I never wanted children. If I'd been deeply in love with a man and he'd wanted children, it would have been difficult.

It's not progress to take books off shelves. If one more person says this [ebooks] is the new Gutenberg, I will probably commit homicide, because the whole point of Gutenberg was to put books on shelves, not to take them off.

Six books… my mother didn’t want books falling into my hands. It never occurred to her that I fell into the books – that I put myself inside them for safe keeping.

When pieces of work speak to us in a way that feels as if they were made just for us, those become our private worlds that we return to.

What a strange world this is when you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo.

For my part, I think we need more emotion, not less. But I think, too, that we need to educate people in how to feel. Emotionalism is not the same as emotion. We cannot cut out emotion - in the economy of the human body, it is the limbic, not the neural, highway that takes precedence. We are not robots...but we act as though all our problems would be solved if only we had no emotions to cloud our judgement.