I remain fascinated by where you go as a woman once you are a mother, and if you ever come back.

The British have always made terrible parents.

It is living, not thinking, as a feminist that has become the challenge.

I'm a novelist, not a social scientist or a commentator.

A sentence is born into this world neither good nor bad, and that to establish its character is a question of the subtlest possible adjustments, a process of intuition to which exaggeration and force are fatal.

That's writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn't turn up.

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.