The true self seeks release, not constraint. It doesnt want to be corseted in a sonnet or made to learn a system of musical notations. It wants liberation, which is why very often it fastens on the novel, for the novel seems spacious, undefined, free.

Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative.

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

As writers go, I have a skin of average thickness. I am pleased by a good review, disappointed by a bad. None of it penetrates far enough to influence the thing I write next.

I was aware, in those early days of motherhood, that my behaviour was strange to the people who knew me well. It was as though I had been brainwashed, taken over by a cult religion. And yet this cult, motherhood, was not a place where I could actually live. Like any cult, it demanded a complete surrender of identity to belong to it.

The British have always made terrible parents.

Divorce also entails the beginning of a supposition that that familial reality might have obstructed one's ability to perceive others.