And feeling clever, I've always thought, is just a sigh away from being cheerful..

The best way to tell people about climate change is through non-fiction. There's a vast literature of outstanding writing on the subject..

At the risk of sounding like Virginia Woolf, I could live on £700 a year..

That love which does not build a foundation on good sense is doomed..

I've never had a moment's doubt. I love you. I believe in you completely. You are my dearest one. My reason for life..

Nothing that can be, can come between me and the full prospect of my hopes..

I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction..

What is it precisely, that feeling of 'returning' from a poem? Something is lighter, softer, larger - then it fades, but never completely..

You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other..

Observing human variety can give pleasure, but so too can human sameness..

When there are no consequences, being wrong is simply a diversion..

The cost of oblivius daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realigment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse. Her reveri….

Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist..

We know so little about each other. We lie mostly submerged, like ice floes, with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white..

I'm delighted when people respond with passion and readily intensity to my work. Literature is not as the economist would put it a positional good; i….

How easily this unthinking family love was forgotten..

In a nuclear age, and in an age of serious environmental degradation, apocalyptic belief creates a serious second order danger. The precarious logic ….

We knew so little about eachother. We lay mostly submerged, like ice floes with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white. Here was a ….

How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form t….

She had lolled about for three years at Girton with the kind of books she could equally have read at home--Jane Austen, Dickens, Conrad, all in the l….

However, withered, I still feel myself to be exactly the same person I've always been. Hard to explain that to the young. we may look truly reptilian….