I have absolutely no concept of work, except for university. But I like to talk to people a lot about their jobs.

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.

The anorexic body is held in the grip of will alone; its meaning is far from stable. What it says - 'Notice me, feed me, mother me' - is not what it means, for such attentions constitute an agonising test of that will, and also threaten to return the body to the dreaded 'normality' it has been such ecstasy to escape.

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.

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

Like the child, the creative writing student is posited as a centre of vulnerable creativity, needful of attention and authority.

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