I think a lot of artists no longer want to participate in or be associated with narrative because of its corruptedness in contemporary culture.

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.

As it stands, motherhood is a sort of wilderness through which each woman hacks her way, part martyr, part pioneer; a turn of events from which some women derive feelings of heroism, while others experience a sense of exile from the world they knew.

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

I don't really believe in stories, only in the people who tell them.

I'm waiting for the day when my children cease to find my domestic propriety reassuring and actually find it annoying.

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.