The feminist movement has been important to me because it's made me feel less odd and also because it has made me understand some of the pressures on women which I was lucky enough to have escaped, perhaps because of my eccentricity or the oddness of my upbringing.

Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been - what people needed protection from. Now nature tamed, endangered, mortal - needs to be protected from people.

On the level of simple sensation and mood, making love surely resembles an epileptic fit at least as much as, if not more than, it does eating a meal or conversing with someone.

She felt herself needing more and more sleep. When she awoke in the morning, she thought of when she might lie down again - and when she would sleep. She started going to the movies.

One could plausibly argue that it is for quite sound reasons that the whole capacity for sexual ecstasy is inaccessible to most people - given that sexuality is something, like nuclear energy, which may prove amenable to domestication through scruple, but then again may not.

Cancer patients are lied to, not just because the disease is (or is thought to be) a death sentence, but because it is felt to be obscene - in the original meaning of that word: ill-omened, abominable, repugnant to the senses.

I make an idol of my moral consciousness. My pursuit of the good is corrupted by the sin of idolatry.