We live as best we may in a world of worms.

By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, then being on somebody else’s.

Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.

In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn’t change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie.

When Jordan was a baby he sat on top of me much as a fly rests on a hill of dung. And I nourished him as a hill of dung nourishes a fly, and when...

My grandmother whispering to herself, over and over, “David is in heaven now, David is in heaven now,’ my mind repeating Schrodinger’s Cat, Schrodinger’s Cat.

Singing is my pleasure, but not in church, for the parson said the gargoyles must remain on the outside, not seek room in the choir stalls. So I sing inside the mountain of my flesh,...

Once you start recognizing your own obsessions, you know you’re getting old.

Islands are metaphors of the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise.

You’ll get over it…” It’s the clichés that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. You don’t get over it because ‘it” is the person you loved....

Language is a finding-place not a hiding place.

For some, perhaps for many, books are spare time. For me, the rest of life is spare time: I wake and sleep language. It has always been so.

To say exactly what one means, even to one’s own private satisfaction, is difficult. To say exactly what one means and to involve another person is harder still. Communication between you and me relies on...

He needed some sort of membrane between himself and experience, which, for him, became language.(Jeanette Winterson on T.S.Eliot)

When you are born–what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own– stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say.

Mrs Ratlow was a widow, and she was head of English, but she still did all the cooking and cleaning for her two sons, and she never took holidays because she said — and I...

In that house, you will find my heart. You must break in, Henri, and get it back for me.’Was she mad? We had been talking figuratively. Her heart was in her body like mine. I...

Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.

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.