Help is dangerous because it exists outside the human economy: the only payment for help is gratitude.

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

A feminist man is a bit like a vegetarian: it's the humanitarian principle he's defending, I suppose.

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.

The woman who thinks she can choose femininity, can toy with it like the social drinker toys with wine - well, she's asking for it, asking to be undone, devoured, asking to spend her life perpetrating a new fraud, manufacturing a new fake identity, only this time it's her equality that's fake.

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.

I felt that I could swim for miles, out into the ocean: a desire for freedom, an impulse to move, tugged at me as though it were a thread fastened to my chest. It was an impulse I knew well, and I had learned that it was not the summons from a larger world I used to believe it to be. It was simply a desire to escape from what I had.