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.

I think a lot of artists no longer want to participate in or be associated with narrative because of its corruptedness in contemporary culture.

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

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.

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

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

I don't really believe in stories, only in the people who tell them.