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

The writing you allude to is a form of dissent, but it's also expressive of the need to evolve beyond what is turgid and stale in contemporary fiction.

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

The distinctive feature of my family was intolerance of sensitivity and emotion - everything's great, it all has to be great all the time and why do you have to spoil it? Whereas probably the most fundamental and important thing to me has been defending my right to tell the truth about how I feel.

Leaving things behind and starting again is a way of coping with difficulties. I learnt very early in my life that I was able to leave a place and still remain myself.

Honest criticism, I suppose, has its place. But honest writing is infinitely more valuable.

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