If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse.

I am a good and interested mother - which has surprised me.

The distinctive feature of my family was intolerance of sensitivity and emotion - everything's great, it all has to be great all the time and why do you have to spoil it? Whereas probably the most fundamental and important thing to me has been defending my right to tell the truth about how I feel.

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

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.

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

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