Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative..

Christianity has kept itself going for centuries on hope alone, and has perpetrated all manner of naughtiness in the meantime..

You could time a suburban story by your watch: it lasts as long as it takes a small furry animal that's lonely to find friends, or a small furry anim….

Help is dangerous because it exists outside the human economy: the only payment for help is gratitude..

A neighbor is something that belongs to the stable world of home life, the thing that lives next door to you..

Divorce also entails the beginning of a supposition that that familial reality might have obstructed one's ability to perceive others..

I have absolutely no concept of work, except for university. But I like to talk to people a lot about their jobs..

Society in the English countryside is still strangely, quaintly divided. If black comedy and a certain type of social commentary are what you want, I….

To become a mother is to learn a whole language - to relearn it, perhaps, as it was the tongue to which we were born - and hence gain entrance to a f….

Feminism remains something that needs to be explained to people..

What I increasingly felt, in marriage and in motherhood, was that to live as a woman and to live as a feminist were two different and possibly irreco….

A sentence is born into this world neither good nor bad, and that to establish its character is a question of the subtlest possible adjustments, a pr….

People are least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them..

It's a pretty brutal process, having a baby..

The writing you allude to is a form of dissent, but it's also expressive of the need to evolve beyond what is turgid and stale in contemporary fictio….

Hope is one of those no-win-no-fee things, and although it needs some encouragement to survive, its existence doesn't necessarily prove anything..

For me, a novel is always the result of my attempt to impose myself on raw circumstances. It is a concrete form of lived experience..

Hope is like one of those orchids that grows around toxic waste: lovely in itself - and an assertion, if you like, of indefatigable good - but a sure….

That's writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn't turn up..

In domestic life the woman's value is inherent, unquantifiable; at home she exchanges proven values for mythological ones. She "wants" to be at home,….

I think a lot of artists no longer want to participate in or be associated with narrative because of its corruptedness in contemporary culture..