Poetry, I thought then, and still do, is a matter of space on the page interrupted by a few well-chosen words, to give them importance. Prose is a less grand affair which has to stretch to the edges of the page to be convincing.
I have never got on with the quietist movements: they lapse too easily into self-congratulations: I have found the oneness, you have not. I prefer to look outside myself if I possibly can, not inside. Meditation reminds me too forcibly of being made to lie on a mat at nursery school and take an hour’s
Ask any woman in an arranged marriage. Love is the least stressful way out.
We shelter children for a time; we live side by side with men; and that is all. We owe them nothing, and are owed nothing. I think we owe our friends more, especially our female friends.
Novelists… fashioning nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly through the chaos of his own existence.
Writing is more than just the making of a series of comprehensible statements: it is the gathering in of connotations; the harvesting of them, like blackberries in a good season, ripe and heavy, snatched from among the thorns of logic.
The peculiar need to write is increased, it seems, rather than allayed with practice.
I like sex. I’ve had feedback but men will feed you back anything, won’t they?
There is no real escape from autobiography into biography. The self has to be faced, or we die.