I was sixteen and my mother was about to throw me out of the house forever, for breaking a very big rule, even bigger than the forbidden books. The rule was not just No Sex,...

I didn’t want to be in the teeming mass of the working class.[…] I didn’t want to live and die in the same place with only a week at the seaside in between. I dreamed...

When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself.

Growing up is difficult. Strangely, even when we have stopped growing physically, we seem to have to keep on growing emotionally, which involves both expansion and shrinkage, as some parts of us develop and others...

I have written about other worlds often enough. I have said what I can say. There are many kinds of reality. This is but one kind.

Now that physics is proving the intelligence of the universe what are we to do about the stupidity of mankind? I include myself. I know that the earth is not flat but my feet are....

I had lines inside me, a string of guiding lights. I had language. Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination. I had been damaged, and...

She hated being a nobody and like all children, adopted or not, I have had to live out some of her unlived life. We do that for our parents – we don’t really have any...

Hold in, hold in, one crack and the wall is breached. I need now to be finite, self-contained, to stop this bacterial grief dividing and multiplying till its weight is the weight of the world....

There’s no choice that doesn’t mean a loss.

Oxford was not a conspiracy of silence as far as women were concerned; it was a conspiracy of ignorance.

If the demons lived anywhere it was here.

As your lover describes you, so you are.

I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.

It is a night for reading.

Who taught you to write in blood on my back? Who taught you to use your hands as branding irons? You have scored your name into my shoulders, referenced me with your mark. The pads...

Fall for me, as an apple falls, as rain falls, because you must. Use gravity to anchor your desire.

If you think about something for long enough,’ she explained, `more than likely, that thing will happen.’ She tapped her head. `It’s all in the mind.

Examine this statement: ‘A woman cannot be a poet.’ Dr Samuel Johnson (Englishman 1709-84 Occupation: Language Fixer and Big Mouth.) What then shall I give up? My poetry or my womanhood?

Hopeless heart that thrives on paradox; that longs for the beloved and is secretly relieved when the beloved is not there.

What it means to be human is to bring up your children in safety, educate them, keep them healthy, teach them how to care for themselves and others, allow them to develop in their own...

Pain is very often a maimed creature without a mouth.

Atlas said, ‘Must my future be so heavy?’ Hera said, ‘That is your present, Atlas. Your future hardens every day, but it is not fixed.’ ‘How can I escape my fate?’ ‘You must choose your...

Those old sayings about Give It Time, and Time is a Healer depend on just whose time it is.

In the space between chaos and shape there was another chance.

even the ones I wrote myself. Here, look, it begins…

Truth for anyone is a very complex thing. For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those things you include. What lies beyond the margin of the text? The photographer frames the...

Books, for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home – they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside...

I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don’t have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they...

I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close.

I am good at walking away. Rejection teaches you how to reject.

I think men can really get in the way when you are trying to sort your life out and get on with it. Because they just take up so much space. I’m not under any...

There is no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you value.

What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home. I want to be held. I don’t want...

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.

Reading things that are relevant to the facts of your life is of limited value. The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there....

It may be that you are settled in another place it may be that you are happy but the one who took your heart wields final power.

When I say ‘I will be true to you’ I am drawing a quiet space beyond the reach of other desires. No-one can legislate love; it cannot be given orders or cajoled into service. Love...

They believed that if a mouse found your hair clippings and built a nest with them you got a headache. If the nest was big enough, you might go mad.

After loss of Identity, the most potent modern terror, is loss of sexuality, or, as Descartes didn’t say, “I fuck therefore I am”.

When my husband had an affair with someone else I watched his eyes glaze over when we ate dinner together and I heard him singing to himself without me, and when he tended the garden...

I can’t be a priest because although my heart is as loud as hers I can pretend no answering riot. I have shouted to God and the Virgin, but they have not shouted back and...

We heal up through being loved, and through loving others. We don’t heal by forming a secret society of one – by assessing about the only other ‘one’ we might admit, and being doomed to...

Women always bring it back to the personal,’ said Handsome. ‘It’s why you can’t be world leaders.”And men never do,’ I said, ‘which is why we end up with no world left to lead.

Living with life is very hard. Mostly we do our best to stifle life – to be tame or to be wanton. to be tranquillised or raging. Extremes have the same effect; they insulate us...

She was a monster, but she was my monster.

Foolish fancy. This is life as it is lived.

Sometimes I think of you and I feel giddy. Memory makes me lightheaded, drunk on champagne. All the things we did. And if anyone has said this was the price I would have agreed to...

A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.

Nowadays people talk about the things he did as though they made sense. As though even his most disastrous mistakes were only the result of bad luck or hubris.