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

The writing you allude to is a form of dissent, but it's also expressive of the need to evolve beyond what is turgid and stale in contemporary fiction.

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

I absolutely don't dislike children - I would choose their company over adult company any time.

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.

The anorexic body is held in the grip of will alone; its meaning is far from stable. What it says - 'Notice me, feed me, mother me' - is not what it means, for such attentions constitute an agonising test of that will, and also threaten to return the body to the dreaded 'normality' it has been such ecstasy to escape.