Family life itself, that safest, most traditional, most approved of female choices, is not a sanctuary: It is, perpetually, a dangerous place.

You learn to put your emotional luggage where it will do some good, instead of using it to shit on other people, or blow up aeroplanes.

Nothing succeeds, they say, like success. And certainly nothing fails like failure.

When nothing is sure, everything is possible.

The rare pleasure of being seen for what one is, compensates for the misery of being it.

Perhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it.

The human mind can bear plenty of reality but not too much intermittent gloom.

Auntie Phyl’s last months in the care home were extra pieces. Age is unnecessary. Some of us, like my mother, are fortunate enough to die swiftly and suddenly, in full possession of our faculties and...

And there isn’t any way that one can get rid of the guilt of having a nice body by saying that one can serve society with it, because that would end up with oneself as...

What really annoys me are the ones who write to say, I am doing your book for my final examinations and could you please tell me what the meaning of it is. I find it...

Nothing fails like failure

I need words and print… I need print like an addict. I could live without it, perhaps. But I hope I never have to try.

I confidently predict the collapse of capitalism and the beginning of history. Something will go wrong in the machinery that converts money into money, the banking system will collapse totally, and we will be left...

Minor talents or failing talents ask much of those who associate with them. They suck, they cling, they sour, they devour, and they can kill their hosts. Disappointment is a deadly companion. We didn’t yet...

Nothing fails like failure.

She liked Christian names, she liked those who used them as a sign of easy inclusion and intimacy, but to her the use of a name remained a proclamation, an action, an event. She was...

Affluence was, quite simply, a question of texture … The threadbare carpets of infancy, the coconut matting, the ill-laid linoleum, the utility furniture … had all spoken of a life too near the bones of...