What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.

writers are makers, not just transmitters, of myths. Literature offers not only myths but counter-myths, just as life offers counter-experiences - experiences that confound what you thought you thought, or felt, or believed.

While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects) — a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be.

What seems distinctively modern as a unit of thought, of art, of discourse is the fragment; and the quotation is one kind of fragment.

I have been told that I am a "natural" feminist, someone who was born a feminist. In fact I was quite blind to what the problem was: I couldn't understand why anyone would hesitate to do what they wanted to do just because they were told that women didn't do such things.

What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive.

The writers or artists I write about are not necessarily those I care most about (Shakespeare is still my favourite writer) but those whose work I feel has been neglected.