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

The creativity of childhood was often surrendered amid feelings of unworthiness. So the idea that ­others are demanding to be given it back - to be "taught" - is disturbing.

Childhood, after all, is not an ending, but rather a state full of potent curiosity.

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

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

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

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