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.

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.

As it stands, motherhood is a sort of wilderness through which each woman hacks her way, part martyr, part pioneer; a turn of events from which some women derive feelings of heroism, while others experience a sense of exile from the world they knew.

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

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

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

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