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.