In every society, the definitions of sanity and madness are arbitrary - are, in the largest sense, political.

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.

God, living is enormous!

I belong rather to a more classical tradition of social analysis.

Writing is a mysterious activity.

Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through.

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.