“Allow me to put the record straight. I am forty-six and have been for some years past.”

You are always naked when you start writing; you are always as if you had never written anything before; you are always a beginner.

The trick is not how much pain you feel – but how much joy you feel

Why does life need evidence of life?

What I would like to give my daughter is freedom. And this is something that must be given by example, not by exhortation.

The trick is not how much pain you feel–but how much joy you feel. Any idiot can feel pain.

Motherhood cannot finally be delegated.

A new dog never replaces an old dog, it merely expands the heart.

Before things are written down they don’t exist in quite the same way. The act of fixing them in words gives them a kind of currency that can be traded.

I vowed to give up sex, bacon, and air travel if I ever made it back to terra firma in one piece.

Every time I catch myself saying, “Oh no, you shouldn’t try that,” I think, “Yes, I should.”

They keep saying the right person will come along. I think mine got hit by a truck.

I myself hate that old Hemingwayesque paradigm of the writer as prizefighter and I have tried hard to create an alternate one for myself.

Conflict is the soul of literature.

You can’t be creative and still be a good girl.

Memory is the most transient of all possessions. And when it goes, it leaves as few traces as stars that have disappeared.

The greatest feminists have also been the greatest lovers. I’m thinking not only of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, but of Anais Nin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and of course Sappho.

f they’d been working with Alec Guinness, for instance, they wouldn’t have known they were born if they’d not towed the line!

Villains are a ball. People have been laughing at me for 50 years, so I love to sit in the back of the theater and listen to them hate me.

I think Joe Leiberman has been one of the leaders of the country… people have such a broad respect for him as a moral force.

Franz Kafka is an idea person. His books begin and end in ideas. Ideas have always been important to me in my writing.

Everything I have ever written has been in the same chair, in the same room.

Regulators have not been able to achieve the level of future clarity required to act pre-emptively.

In missional churches, the baby birds have been pushed out of the nest and are learning to fly for themselves.

I always wanted to be a golfer, only I realised that if I’d played golf I would have been skint.