Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative.

How can there be so many mothers in the world but so little sense of what it might be to become one?

I am a good and interested mother - which has surprised me.

There is a slovenly disrespect for truth and reality that has infected and cross-infected the arts; the values of entertainment are relentlessly in the ascendant, to the extent that it becomes virtually impossible to write a naturalistic fictional sentence without feeling that the fabric of that sentence is already compromised.

A feminist man is a bit like a vegetarian: it's the humanitarian principle he's defending, I suppose.

For me, a novel is always the result of my attempt to impose myself on raw circumstances. It is a concrete form of lived experience.

A creative writing workshop will contain students whose ambitions and abilities, whose conceptions of literature itself, are so diverse that what they have in common - the desire to write - could almost be considered meaningless.