"People do go back, but they don't survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time. Such things are too much. You can salt your heart, or kill your heart, or you choose between the two realities. There is so much pain here."

"A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?"

"I had relationships with men as well as women. I wasn't choosing; I didn't think I had to."

"Infatuation. First Love. Lust. My passion can be explained away. But this is sure: Whatever she touches, she reveals."

"Often when she liked a picture she found that she was liking some part of herself, some part of her that was in accord with the picture."

"Your weak point is the open, vulnerable place where you can always be hurt. Love, in all its aspects, opens the self so fully."

"A tough life needs a tough language-and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers-a language powerful enough to say how it is."

"I think we still believe that ambition is for boys."

"Passion out of passion's obstacles."

"Growing up is difficult. Strangely, even when we have stopped growing physically, we seem to have to keep on growing emotionally, which involves both expansion and shrinkage, as some parts of us develop and others must be allowed to disappear...Rigidity never works; we end up being the wrong size for our world."

"The future is foretold from the past and the future is only possible because of the past. Without past and future, the present is partial. All time is eternally present and so all time is ours. There is no sense in forgetting and every sense in dreaming. Thus the present is made rich."

"I think therefore I am. Does that mean 'I feel therefore I'm not'? But only through feeling can I get at thinking."

"I was at a party in 1989 and Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie were sitting on a sofa wondering where the next generation of great British writers would come from. As we talked, it became clear they had never read a word by me."

"The wider we read the freer we become."

"I hate the word lesbian; it tells you nothing; its only purpose is to inflame."

"It's true that heroes are inspiring but mustn't they also do some rescuing if they are to be worthy of their name? Would Wonder Woman matter if she only sent commiserating telegrams to the distressed?"

"The true nature of the world is energy not mass."

"I like to look at how people work together when they are put into stressful situations, when life stops being cozy."

"Love demands expression. It will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, be seen and not heard, no. It will break out in tongues of praise, the high note that smashes the glass and spills the liquid."

"You are a pool of clear water where the light plays."

"We bury things so deep we no longer remember there was anything to bury. Our bodies remember. Our neurotic states remember. But we don't."

"Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. What then kills love? Only this: Neglect. Not to see you when you stand before me. Not to think of you in the little things. Not to make the road wide for you, the table spread for you. To choose you out of habit not desire, to pass the flower seller without a thought. To leave the dishes unwashed, the bed unmade, to ignore you in the mornings, make use of you at night. To crave another while pecking your cheek. To say your name without hearing it, to assume it is mine to call."

"Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don't believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It's all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat's cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more."

"It's a symbiotic process, writing. What I am makes the books-not part of me, all of me-and then the books themselves inform the sense of what I am. So the more I can be, the better the books will be."

"You cannot disown what is yours. Flung out, there is always the return, the reckoning, the revenge, perhaps the reconciliation. There is always the return. And the wound will take you there."

"There is a certain seductiveness about dead things. You can ill treat, alter and recolour what's dead. It won't complain."

"Everyone's talking about the death and disappearance of the book as a format and an object. I don't think that will happen. I think whatever happens, we have to figure out a way to protect our imaginations. Stories and poetry do that. You need a language in this world. People want words, they want to hear their situation in language, and find a way to talk about it. It allows you to find a language to talk about your own pain.If you give kids a language, they can use it. I think that's what these educators fear. If you really educate these kids, they aren't going to punch you in the face, they are going to challenge you with your own language."

"She was fragile, gentle, wide awake in a sleeping world."

"Once you start recognizing your own obsessions, you know you're getting old."

"Be with someone you don't want to be without."

"I never wanted children. If I'd been deeply in love with a man and he'd wanted children, it would have been difficult."

"Nobody knows anything about Shakespeare the person. It's all legend, it is all rumor."

"Rights begin where love ends. Shall we argue over who is the most to blame?"

"It is the duty of every generation of writers and artists to find fresh ways of expressing the habitual circumstances of the human condition. To serve up the lukewarm remains of yesterdays dinner is easy, profitable and popular, (for a while). It is also wrong."

"By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, then being on somebody else's."

"The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home."

"Passion is not such an emotion as a destiny."

"I don't understand why people talk of art as a luxury when it's a mind-altering possibility."

"Zel so often put himself outside of where he wanted to be and then looked in dumbly through the window of his longing, hurt and beaten and knowing that he had hurt and beaten himself but still he did it, over and over."

"My friends and the people who are close to me know what I am. And that is enough."

"Why should literature be easy? Sometimes you can do what you want to do in a simple, direct way that is absolutely right. Sometimes you can't. Reading is not a passive act. Books are not TV. Art of all kinds is an interactive challenge. The person who makes the work and the person who comes to the work both have a job to do. I am never wilfully obscure, but I do ask for some effort."

"I thought no one was talking to me and the others thought I wasn't talking to them."

"You said, 'I love you.' Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? 'I love you' is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I, yet when you say it and when I say it we speak like savages who have found three words and worship them."

"If you think about something for long enough,' she explained, `more than likely, that thing will happen.' She tapped her head. `It's all in the mind."

"If the universe is movement, it will not be in one direction only. We think of our lives as linear but it is the spin of the earth that allows us to observe time. Walk with me."

"The ancients believed in Fate because they recognized how hard it is for anyone to change anything. The pull of past and future is so strong that the present is crushed by it. We lie helpless in the force of patterns inherited and patterns re-enacted by our own behavior. The burden is intolerable."

"Truth for anyone is a very complex thing. For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those things you include. What lies beyond the margin of the text? The photographer frames the shot; writers frame their world."

"Women always bring it back to the personal,' said Handsome. 'It's why you can't be world leaders.''And men never do,' I said, 'which is why we end up with no world left to lead."

"No. Take the heart first. Then you don't feel the cold so much. The pain so much. With the heart gone, there's no reason to stay your hand. Your eyes can look on death and not tremble. It's the heart that betrays us, makes us weep, makes us bury our friends when we should be marching ahead. It's the heart that sickens us at night and makes us hate who we are. It's the heart that sings old songs and brings memories of warm days."

"We did photograph albums, best dresses, favourite novels, and once someone's own novel. It was about a week in a telephone box with a pair of pyjamas called Adolf Hitler. The heroine was a piece of string with a knot in it."