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

Hope is one of those no-win-no-fee things, and although it needs some encouragement to survive, its existence doesn't necessarily prove anything.

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

It's a pretty brutal process, having a baby.

I remain fascinated by where you go as a woman once you are a mother, and if you ever come back.

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.

To become a mother is to learn a whole language - to relearn it, perhaps, as it was the tongue to which we were born - and hence gain entrance to a forgotten world of comprehension.