Nobody is surprised that women writers accurately represent male characters over and over again, no doubt because everybody knows that women understand men much better than vice-versa.

God, in the orthodox view, causes famine, plague, and flood. Was God evil? Evil is a convenient fiction.

Occasionally.. .what you have to do is go back to the beginning and see everything in a new way.

My first real breakthrough collided with the last months of Callaghan's Labour government, which had every intention of enjoying my success as much as I did.

To do magic, to do great magic, he has to know himself as a piece of the universe.A piece of the universe?A little piece that has all the rest of it in it. Everything outside of him is also inside of him.

I instantly chucked my academic ambitions and began writing fiction full-time.

Instead, I was interested in what I guess I could call narrative indeterminacy, in questioning the apparent, taken-for-granted authority of any particular representation of the events in question.