Oppression involves a failure of the imagination: the failure to imagine the full humanity of other human beings.

It doesn't really matter what "genre" your book is. What matters is that it's a good book of its kind. Whatever that kind may be.

You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.

I did not know how to paint or even what to paint, but I knew I had to begin.

Always good to take a look at the long list for the Mann Booker, for the Commonwealth. It gives you an overview.There is so much going on all over the world that it's impossible for one person to keep up. And I can't.

I walk away from him. It's enormously pleasing to me, this walking away. It's like being able to make people appear and vanish, at will.

poetry is where the language is renewed.