Writers of either gender ought to be able to do the opposite sex-that's one basic test of competence, after all.

Women were brought up to believe that men were the answer. They weren't. They weren't even one of the questions.

In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.

I remember laughing with relief that the same old adolescent boredom goes on from generation to generation. ...the words took me back to my own years of stagnancy, and that terrible waiting for life to begin. [p. 68]

Sometimes you find the panel, but it doesn’t open; sometimes it opens, and your gaze meets nothing but a mouse skeleton. But at least you’ve looked. That’s the real distinction between people: not between those who have secrets and those who don’t, but between those who want to know everything and those who don’t. This search is a sign of love I maintain.

We live, we die, we are remembered, we are forgotten.

How rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves. We are all lost at sea, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us.