Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Modern morality is all about perception.
It's a pretty brutal process, having a baby.
The British have always made terrible parents.
I'm a novelist, not a social scientist or a commentator.
I am a good and interested mother - which has surprised me.
Writing is a discipline: it's almost all about holding back.
Feminism remains something that needs to be explained to people.
If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse.
I don't really believe in stories, only in the people who tell them.
Every time I write a book, I've probably taken five years off my life.
What other grown-up gets told how to do their job so often as a writer?
There is always shame in the creation of an object for the public gaze.
It is living, not thinking, as a feminist that has become the challenge.
That's writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn't turn up.
Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative.
People are least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them.
To be optimistic about something that is absolutely unknown to you is unfounded.
Childhood, after all, is not an ending, but rather a state full of potent curiosity.
What compromises women - babies, domesticity, mediocrity - compromises writing even more.
Honest criticism, I suppose, has its place. But honest writing is infinitely more valuable.
I absolutely don't dislike children - I would choose their company over adult company any time.
I remain fascinated by where you go as a woman once you are a mother, and if you ever come back.
How can there be so many mothers in the world but so little sense of what it might be to become one?
A feminist man is a bit like a vegetarian: it's the humanitarian principle he's defending, I suppose.
Help is dangerous because it exists outside the human economy: the only payment for help is gratitude.
I suppose, I said, it is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see.
A neighbor is something that belongs to the stable world of home life, the thing that lives next door to you.
I have absolutely no concept of work, except for university. But I like to talk to people a lot about their jobs.
My children are living, thinking human beings. It isn't in my power to regret them, for they belong to themselves.
I'm waiting for the day when my children cease to find my domestic propriety reassuring and actually find it annoying.
Even if they knew the truth of their own feelings, most mothers would be socially and emotionally incapable of revealing it.
We who were born were not witnesses to our birth: like death, it is something we are forever after trying to catch sight of.
Christianity has kept itself going for centuries on hope alone, and has perpetrated all manner of naughtiness in the meantime.
Like the child, the creative writing student is posited as a centre of vulnerable creativity, needful of attention and authority.
Writing, more than any other art, is indexed to the worthiness of the self because it is identified in peoples minds with emotion.
Writing, more than any other art, is indexed to the worthiness of the self because it is identified in people's minds with emotion.
For me, a novel is always the result of my attempt to impose myself on raw circumstances. It is a concrete form of lived experience.
Divorce also entails the beginning of a supposition that that familial reality might have obstructed one's ability to perceive others.
I think a lot of artists no longer want to participate in or be associated with narrative because of its corruptedness in contemporary culture.
Hope is one of those no-win-no-fee things, and although it needs some encouragement to survive, its existence doesn't necessarily prove anything.
The writing you allude to is a form of dissent, but it's also expressive of the need to evolve beyond what is turgid and stale in contemporary fiction.
Female hysteria is a subject I'm very fond of. I always try to bring it in somewhere. For me, it is the finest part of the line between comedy and tragedy.
I have some pretty forceful ideas about the world - obviously I do. But I suppose I can only really speak about them from within the protection of a literary form.
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 seems to me that 'women's writing' by nature would not seek equivalence in the male world. It would be a writing that sought to express a distinction, not deny it.
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.
It is interesting how keen people are for you to do something they would never dream of doing themselves, how enthusiasticall y they drive you to your own destruction.
The creativity of childhood was often surrendered amid feelings of unworthiness. So the idea that others are demanding to be given it back - to be 'taught' - is disturbing.
The creativity of childhood was often surrendered amid feelings of unworthiness. So the idea that others are demanding to be given it back - to be "taught" - is disturbing.
As writers go, I have a skin of average thickness. I am pleased by a good review, disappointed by a bad. None of it penetrates far enough to influence the thing I write next.