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

Human beings have a need, generally, to destroy things. The Freudian principle of civilisation is correct. There's always, always a difference between the family image and the reality.

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

Christianity has kept itself going for centuries on hope alone, and has perpetrated all manner of naughtiness in the meantime.

An eating disorder epidemic suggests that love and disgust are being jointly marketed, as it were; that wherever the proposition might first have come from, the unacceptability of the female body has been disseminated culturally.

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.