A creative writing workshop will contain students whose ambitions and abilities, whose conceptions of literature itself, are so diverse that what they have in common - the desire to write - could almost be considered meaningless.

It is living, not thinking, as a feminist that has become the challenge.

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

What I increasingly felt, in marriage and in motherhood, was that to live as a woman and to live as a feminist were two different and possibly irreconcilable things.

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

Human beings have a need, generally, to destroy things. The Freudian principle of civilisation is correct. There's always, always a difference between the family image and the reality.

I'm a novelist, not a social scientist or a commentator.