The British have always made terrible parents.

I felt that I could swim for miles, out into the ocean: a desire for freedom, an impulse to move, tugged at me as though it were a thread fastened to my chest. It was an impulse I knew well, and I had learned that it was not the summons from a larger world I used to believe it to be. It was simply a desire to escape from what I had.

I absolutely don't dislike children - I would choose their company over adult company any time.

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

The true self seeks release, not constraint. It doesnt want to be corseted in a sonnet or made to learn a system of musical notations. It wants liberation, which is why very often it fastens on the novel, for the novel seems spacious, undefined, free.

What other grown-up gets told how to do their job so often as a writer?

Help is dangerous because it exists outside the human economy: the only payment for help is gratitude.