I'm waiting for the day when my children cease to find my domestic propriety reassuring and actually find it annoying.

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

There is always shame in the creation of an expressive work, whether it's a book or a clay pot. Every artist worries about how they will be seen by others through their work. When you create, you aspire to do justice to yourself, to remake yourself, and there is always the fear that you will expose the very thing that you hoped to transform.

I don't really believe in stories, only in the people who tell them.

As it stands, motherhood is a sort of wilderness through which each woman hacks her way, part martyr, part pioneer; a turn of events from which some women derive feelings of heroism, while others experience a sense of exile from the world they knew.

There are certain types of slightly hysterical human characters who, rather than creating, walk around with a sense of their own potential - it's as if they themselves were art objects. They feel as if their lives are written narratives, or pieces of music.

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