Shakespeare is so kinky.

This is how the girl who couldn’t speak and the man who couldn’t see fell in love.

All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.All of them?Sure, he says. Think about it. There’s escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the...

When any civilization is dust and ashes,” he said, “art is all that’s left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning—human meaning, that is—is defined by them. You have to admit that.

There was old sex in the room and loneliness, and expectation, of something without a shape or name. I remember that yearning, and was never the same as the hands that were on us there...

There is something powerful in the whispering of obscenities, about those in power. There’s something delightful about it, something naughty, secretive, forbidden, thrilling. It’s like a spell, of sorts. It deflates them, reduces them to...

They didn’t realize that her clumsiness was not the ordinary kind, not poor coordination. It was just because she wasn’t sure where the edges of her body ended and the rest of the world began.

Ger says that Kat has a tendency to push things to extremes, to go over the edge, merely from a juvenile desire to shock, which is hardly a substitute for wit. One of these days,...

It must have been an endless breathing in: between the wish to know and the wish to praise there was no seam.

Optimism means better than reality; pessimism means worse than reality. I’m a realist.

As an artist your first loyalty is to your art. Unless this is the case, you’re going to be a second-rate artist.

I began writing at the age of 5, but there was a dark period between the ages of 8 and 16 when I didn’t write. I started again at 16 and have no idea why,...

I’m from the generation that had the boys’ door and the girls’ door when you went to school, and you got in big trouble if you went in the wrong one.

Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there’s no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It’s loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the...

The Orange prize has been pivotal in the careers of many women writers – it’s given them that extra push, and that extra dollop of confidence.

The pile of stones thus marks both an act of deliberate remembrance, and an act of deliberate forgetting. They’re fond of paradox in that region.

Religious people of any serious kind made her nervous: they were like men in raincoats who might or might not be flashers.

Yet each flower, each twig, each pebble, shines as though illuminated from within, as once before, on her first day in the Garden. It’s the stress, it’s the adrenalin, it’s a chemical effect: she knows...

A Tennyson garden, heavy with scent, languid; the return of the word swoon.

We understand more than we know.

SPRING POEMIt is spring, my decision, the earthferments like rising breador refuse, we are burninglast year’s weeds, the smokeflares from the road, the clumped stalksglow like sluggish phoenixes / it wasn’tonly my fault / birdsongs...

Perhaps they were looking for passion; perhaps they delved into this book as into a mysterious parcel – a gift box at the bottom of which, hidden in layers of rustling tissue paper, lay something...

Strange how we decorate pain.These ribbons, for instance,and the small hard teardrops of blood.Who are they for?Do we think the dead care?

You need to give money when someone gives you a knife. So the bad luck won’t cut you. I wouldn’t like it for you to be cut by the bad luck, Jimmy.

Every month there is a moon, gigantic, round, heavy, an omen. IT transits, pauses, continues on and passes out of sight, and I see despair coming towards me like famine. To feel that empty, again,...

We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves.

Here the children have a custom. After the celebration of evil they take those vacant heads that shone once with such anguish and glee and throw them over the bridge, watching the smash, orange, as...

This above all, to refuse to be a victim.

I particularly like Twitter, because it’s short and can be very funny and informative. It’s a little bit like having your own radio program.

All fat women look the same; they all look 42.

Our generation in the west was lucky: we had readymade gateways. We had books, paper, teachers, schools and libraries. But many in the world lack these luxuries. How do you practice without such tryout venues?

He would have died soon, but more painfully. Anyway, it was Urban Bloodshed Limitation. First rule: limit bloodshed by making sure that none of your own gets spilled.

I want, I don’t want.How can one live with such a heart?

The night is mine, my own time, to do with it as I will, as long as I am quiet. As long as I don’t move. As long as I lie still. The difference between...

But in life, a tragedy is not one long scream. It includes everything that led up to it. Hour after trivial hour, day after day, year after year, and then the sudden moment: the knife...

How could I be sleeping with this particular man…. Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste.

The reason they invented coffins, to lock the dead in, preserve them, they put makeup on them; they didn’t want them spreading or changing into anything else. The stone with the name and date was...

A Sad ChildYou’re sad because you’re sad.It’s psychic. It’s the age. It’s chemical.Go see a shrink or take a pill,or hug your sadness like an eyeless dollyou need to sleep.Well, all children are sadbut some...

There is never only one, of anyone

The possibility of injury or death was a strong attraction: as the online world became more and more pre-edited and slicked up, and as even its so-called reality sites raised questions about authenticity in the...

Ah men,why do you want all this attention?I can write poems for myself, make love to a doorknob if absolutelynecessary. What do you have to offer meI can’t find otherwiseexcept humiliation? Which I no longerneed.

I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.

Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we’re still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants. We put on display our framed photographs, our...

The Governor’s wife cuts these crimes out of the newspapers and pastes them in; she will even write away for old newspapers with crimes that were done before her time. It is her collection, she...

If I waited for perfection… I would never write a word.

All fiction is about people, unless it’s about rabbits pretending to be people. It’s all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that’s what we call ‘the...

My brother and I were both good at science, and we were both good at English literature. Either one of us could have gone either way.

When you’re writing a novel, you don’t want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that. Reality simply consists of different points of...

No one knows what cuases an outer landscape to become an inner one.

I write as if I’ve lived a lot of things I haven’t lived.