Impossible not to imagine the dead observing us. Our love for them a soft, shimmering gossamar that trails behind us.

Ideas brush past fleeting and insubstantial as moths. But I let them go, I don't want them. What I want is a voice.

It's not hard to write poorly. But to write something good, it has to be revised.

A writer’s life is in his work, and that is the place to find him.

Language is the instrument in all cases and can language be trusted?If it were not for language, could we lie?

I am not conscious of working especially hard, or of 'working' at all. Writing and teaching have always been, for me, so richly rewarding that I don't think of them as work in the usual sense of the word.

My grandmother could never have written a memoir, so 'The Gravedigger's Daughter' is a homage to her life, and to the lives of other young women of her generation, which are so rarely articulated.