I learned early and at that kitchen table that there are ways of avoiding, without guilt, the commitments of love.

It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed.

Publishers don't nurse you; they buy and sell you.

A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.

Childhood is the one prison from which there's no escape, the one sentence from which there's no appeal. We all serve our time.

The world is full of people who have lost faith: politicians who have lost faith in politics, social workers who have lost faith in social work, schoolteachers who have lost faith in teaching and, for all I know, policemen who have lost faith in policing and poets who have lost faith in poetry. It's a condition of faith that it gets lost from time to time, or at least mislaid.

however long we have to live, there are never enough springs.