Everything in writing begins with language. Language begins with listening.

I think we still believe that ambition is for boys.

The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home.

London is a small place, and it is very incestuous. People know where you live. Everybody is sort of on top of each other.

Your weak point is the open, vulnerable place where you can always be hurt. Love, in all its aspects, opens the self so fully.

Quest is at the heart of what I do-the holy grail, and the terror that you'll never find it, seemed a perfect metaphor for life.

I hate the word lesbian; it tells you nothing; its only purpose is to inflame.

Anything outside marriage seems like freedom and excitement.

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

My friends and the people who are close to me know what I am. And that is enough.

I like to look at how people work together when they are put into stressful situations, when life stops being cozy.

I wanted to write a new fable and see how many rules you could break.

Ordinary professionalism and 20 years' experience can accomplish a lot, but it can't access the hidden places.

One room is always enough for one person. Two rooms is not enough for two people. That is one of the conundrums in life.

I wanted to invent myself as a fictional character. And I did, and it has caused a great deal of confusion.

With animal behavior, they're all fine until you introduce some rogue element into the cage, and then they go crazy.

The work that lasts over time is the work which still speaks to us when all contemporary interest in that work is extinct.

I had relationships with men as well as women. I wasn't choosing; I didn't think I had to.

Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens.

I never wanted children. If I'd been deeply in love with a man and he'd wanted children, it would have been difficult.

In my subconscious, my books were part of a single emotional journey.

I don't understand why people talk of art as a luxury when it's a mind-altering possibility.

I hated historical novels with fluttering cloaks.

Writers have to have a knack for listening. I need to be able to hear what is being said to me by the voices I create.

Whether you want to call it God or the mystery of the cosmos doesn't matter to me.

Whatever is powerful to you can be translated into something which will matter to somebody that you will never know.

To me, life, for all its privations, is a luminous thing. You have to risk it.

To create a past that seemed authentic but would be a fiction, you need an invented language.

There are so many separate selves; no one who writes creatively hasn't felt that.

Nobody knows anything about Shakespeare the person. It's all legend, it is all rumor.

My characters are always on the outside; the spotlight's not on them. But they do get somewhere.