There would be more genuine rejoicing at the discovery of a complete new novel by Jane Austen than any other literary discovery, short of a new major….

Novels, since the birth of the genre, have been full of rejected, seduced, and abandoned maidens, whose proper fate is to die..

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….

What foolsmiddle-classgirls are to expect other people to respect the same gods as themselves and E M Forster..

There are some people who cannot get onto a train without imagining that they are about to voyage into the significant unknown; as though the notion ….

Scenery can be a violent stimulant..

I'd rather be at the end of a dying tradition, which I admire, than at the beginning of a tradition which I deplore..

On one thing professionals and amateurs agree: mothers can't win..

Lord knows what incommunicable small terrors infants go through, unknown to all..

If I knew what the meanings of my books were, I wouldn't have bothered to write them..

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

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 ….

World War II put feminism on hold for a long time; the men went away to fight, a lot of women in those years got jobs both in teaching and in factori….

Men and women can never be close. They can hardly speak to one another in the same language. But are compelled, forever, to try, and therefore even i….

Our desire to conform is greater than our respect for objective facts..

Sometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me was the ability to think in quotations..

Nothing fails like failure.

You have to be careful what you imagine, because the act of imagining is the act of encouraging yourself to be a certain kind of person..

When nothing is sure, everything is possible..

My anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable. It has possessed me, like a disease. It rises up in my throat like acid reflux, that fashionabl….

How extraordinary people are, that they get themselves into such situations where they go on doing what they dislike doing, and have no need or oblig….