When you chopped logs with the ax and they split open they smelled beautiful, like Christmas. But when you split someone's head open it smelled like abattoir and quite overpowered the scent of the wild lilacs you'd cut and brought into the house only this morning, which was already another life.

I think about death a lot, I really do, because I can't believe I won't exist. It's the ego isn't it? I feel that I should retreat into a better form of Zen Buddhism than this kind of ego-dominated thing. But I don't know, I mean, I want to come back as a tree but I suspect that it's just not going to happen, is it?

Ursula craved solitude but she hated loneliness, a conundrum that she couldn’t even begin to solve.

Because I write fiction, I don't write autobiography, and to me they are very different things. The first-person narrative is a very intimate thing, but you are not addressing other people as 'I' - you are inhabiting that 'I.'

The past is what you take with you.

He was born a politician. No, Ursula thought, he was born a baby, like everyone else. And this is what he has chosen to become.

I spent four years doing a doctorate in postmodern American literature. I can recognize it when I see it.