From the first place of liquid darkness, within the second place of air and light, I set down the following record with its mixture of fact and truth…

- Janet Frame

I like to see life with its teeth out.

- Janet Frame

Much of living is an attempt to preserve oneself by annexing and occupying others.

- Janet Frame

Every morning I woke in dread, waiting for the day nurse to go on her rounds and announce from the list of names in her hand whether or not I was for…

- Janet Frame

For your own good is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction.

- Janet Frame

I am not really a writer. I am just someone who is haunted, and I will write the hauntings down.

- Janet Frame

The sun is all love and murder, judgement, the perpetual raid of conscience, paratrooping light which opens like a snow-blossom in the downward drift…

- Janet Frame

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the s…

- Janet Frame

There is no past or future. Using tenses to divide time is like making chalk marks on water.

- Janet Frame