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

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

Even if they knew the truth of their own feelings, most mothers would be socially and emotionally incapable of revealing it.

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

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.

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.

A feminist man is a bit like a vegetarian: it's the humanitarian principle he's defending, I suppose.