Because if one has an image, however dim and romantic, of a journey's end, one may, in the end, surely reach it, after no matter how many detours and….

The women are always vixens or monsters. They can't just be normal people in the book..

Scenery can be a violent stimulant..

London, how could one ever be tired of it?.

Poverty, therefore, was comparative. One measured it by a sliding scale. One was always poor, in terms of those who were richer..

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

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

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

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….

I confidently predict the collapse of capitalism and the beginning of history. Something will go wrong in the machinery that converts money into mone….

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 ….

Why can't people be both flexible and efficient?.

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

How unjust life is, to make physical charm so immediately apparent or absent, when one can get away with vices untold for ever..

I actually remember feeling delight, at two o'clock in the morning, when the baby woke for his feed, because I so longed to have another look at him..

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….

England's not a bad country? It's just a mean, cold, ugly, divided, tired, clapped-out, post-imperial, post- industrial slag-heap covered in polystyr….

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

I used to be a reasonably careless and adventurous person before I had children; now I am morbidly obsessed by seat-belts and constantly afraid that ….

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

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