Parenthood, like death, is an event for which it is nearly impossible to be prepared. It brings you into a new relationship with the fact of your own existence, a relationship in which one may be rendered helpless.

We who were born were not witnesses to our birth: like death, it is something we are forever after trying to catch sight of.

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

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

Like the child, the creative writing student is posited as a centre of vulnerable creativity, needful of attention and authority.

People are least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them.

As writers go, I have a skin of average thickness. I am pleased by a good review, disappointed by a bad. None of it penetrates far enough to influence the thing I write next.