A sentence is born into this world neither good nor bad, and that to establish its character is a question of the subtlest possible adjustments, a process of intuition to which exaggeration and force are fatal.

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 is a slovenly disrespect for truth and reality that has infected and cross-infected the arts; the values of entertainment are relentlessly in the ascendant, to the extent that it becomes virtually impossible to write a naturalistic fictional sentence without feeling that the fabric of that sentence is already compromised.

I am a good and interested mother - which has surprised me.

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.

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

Writing, more than any other art, is indexed to the worthiness of the self because it is identified in peoples minds with emotion.