"Look up. This is the season of shooting stars. Light, two thousand years old, still dazzling. Let me see your face. Your face lit up by twenty centuries."

"I knew it like destiny, and at the same time, I knew it as choice."

"It is helpful for a woman artist not to have a husband."

"People like to separate storytelling which is not fact from history which is fact. They do this so that they know what to believe and what not to believe."

"Reading's not a luxury, art's not a luxury. It's about your soul, and it's about yourself. And if reading is a luxury, being human is a luxury."

"Time that withers you will wither me. We will fall like ripe fruit and roll down the grass together. Dear friend, let me lie beside you watching the clouds until the earth covers us and we are gone."

"The free man never thinks of escape."

"I don't read reviews because by then it's too late - whatever anyone says, the book won't change. It is written."

"Hopeless heart that thrives on paradox, that longs for the beloved and is secretly relieved when the beloved is not there."

"Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. 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?"

"[Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they're doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination."

"My books always begin with a sentence and an image - not necessarily connected."

"Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently."

"Who taught you to write in blood on my back? Who taught you to use your hands as branding irons? You have scored your name into my shoulders, referenced me with your mark. The pads of your fingers have become printing blocks, you tap a message on to my skin, tap meaning into my body."

"To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead."

"I was sixteen and my mother was about to throw me out of the house forever, for breaking a very big rule, even bigger than the forbidden books. The rule was not just No Sex, but definitely No Sex With Your Own Sex."

"Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens."

"The riskiness of Art, the reason why it affects us, is not the riskiness of its subject matter, it is the risk of creating a new way of seeing, a new way of thinking."

"The buddhists say there are 149 ways to god. i'm not looking for god, only for myself, and that is far more complicated."

"Now that physics is proving the intelligence of the universe what are we to do about the stupidity of mankind? I include myself. I know that the earth is not flat but my feet are. I know that space is curved but my brain has been condoned by habit to grow in a straight line. What I call light is my own blend of darkness. What I call a view is my hand-painted trompe-l'oeil. I run after knowledge like a ferret down a ferret hole. My limitations, I call the boundaries of what can be known. I interpret the world by confusing other people's psychology with my own."

"Explore me,' you said and I collected my ropes, flasks and maps, expecting to be back home soon. I dropped into the mass of you and I cannot find the way out. Sometimes I think I'm free, coughed up like Jonah from the whale, but then I turn a corner and recognise myself again. Myself in your skin, myself lodged in your bones, myself floating in the cavities that decorate every surgeon's wall. That is how I know you. You are what I know."

"Six books, my mother didn't want books falling into my hands. It never occurred to her that I fell into the books that I put myself inside them for safe keeping."

"What it means to be human is to bring up your children in safety, educate them, keep them healthy, teach them how to care for themselves and others, allow them to develop in their own way among adults who are sane and responsibile, who know the value of the world and not its economic potential. It means art, it means time, it means all the invisibles never counted by the GDP and the census figures. It means knowing that life has an inside as well as an outside. And I think it means love."

"Nowadays people talk about the things he did as though they made sense. As though even his most disastrous mistakes were only the result of bad luck or hubris."

"For fate may hang on any moment and at any moment be changed."

"Islands are metaphors of the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise."

"Perhaps all romance is like that not a contract between equal parties but an explosion of dreams and desires that can find no outlet in everyday life. Only a drama will do and while the fireworks last the sky is a different colour."

"Every moment you steal from the present is a moment you've lost forever. There is only now."

"To create a past that seemed authentic but would be a fiction, you need an invented language."

"The inside and the outside of our lives are each the shell where we learn to live."

"Every journey conceals another journey within its lines; the path not taken and the forgotten angle. These are the journeys I wish to record. Not the ones I made, but the ones I might have made, or perhaps did make in some other place or time."

"At bed-time I went into my room and put out the light. I didn't get undressed. I lay on my bed and looked out of the window at the stars. I read in a book that the stars can take you anywhere. I've never wanted to be an astronaut because of the helmets. If I were up there on the moon, or by the Milky Way, I'd want to feel the stars round my head. I'd want them in my hair the way they are in paintings of the gods. I'd want my whole body to feel the space, the empty space and points of light. That's how dancers must feel, dancers and acrobats, just for a second, that freedom."

"Creativity is on the side of health - it isn't the thing that drives us mad, it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness."

"What are the unreal things but the passion that once burned one like a fire? What are the incredible things but the things that one has faithfully believed? What are the improbable things but the things that one has done oneself?"

"She was a monster, but she was my monster."

"I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close."

"The human heart is my territory. I write about love because it's the most important thing in the world. I write about sex because often it feels like the most important thing in the world."

"I have set off and found that there is no end to even the simplest journey of the mind. I begin, and straight away a hundred alternative routes present themselves. I choose one, no sooner begin, than a hundred more appear. Every time I try to narrow down my intent I expand it, and yet those straits and canals still lead me to the open sea, and then I realize how vast it all is, this matter of the mind. I am confounded by the shining water and the size of the world."

"I go on writing so that I will always have something to read."

"She knew full well that writers were sex-crazed bohemians who broke the rules and didn't go out to work."

"I did not realise that when money becomes the core value, then education drives towards utility or that the life or the mind will not be counted as good unless it produces measurable results. That public services will no longer be important. That an alternative life to getting and spending will become very difficult as cheap housing disappears. That when communities are destroyed only misery and intolerance are left."

"I believe you have to write every day "make the time". It's about having an organized mind instead of a chaotic and untidy one. There is a myth that writers are bohemian and do what they like in their own way. Real writers are the most organized people on the planet. You have to be. You're doing the work and running your own business as well. It's an incredibly organized state. [Also reading] one of the things reading does do is discipline your mind. There are no writers who are not readers."

"When Jordan was a baby he sat on top of me much as a fly rests on a hill of dung. And I nourished him as a hill of dung nourishes a fly, and when he had eaten his fill he left me.Jordan...I should have named him after a stagnant pond and then I could have kept him, but I named him after a river and in the flood-tide he slipped away."

"I am sure that if we can find reconciliation with our past " whether parents, partners or friends " we should try and do that. It won't be perfect, it will be a compromise . . . but it might mean acceptance and, the big word, forgiveness."

"When I was born, my mother dressed me as a boy because she could not afford to feed any more daughters. By the mystic laws of gender and economics, it ruins a peasant to place half a bowl of figs in front of his daughter, while his son may gorge on the whole tree, burn it for firewood and piss on the stump, and still be reckoned a blessing to his father."

"It could be that this record set before you now is a fiction."

"I dreamed I was a single moment in a single day. A note struck and vanished. A sounding. A reckoning. Gone."

"We were the lucky ones, the notthese, we were the ones who had survived the aerial bombing and fire-clusters, the final flash. Regrettable, unavoidable, a war to end all wars, a war for democracy, a war for freedom, peaceful war. Sometimes war is necessary. Sometimes war is right. But to the broken and the dead, to the wounded and the maimed, to the exploded and the shrapnelshattered, to minds gone dark, to eyes that have seen agony no tears can wash away, it hardly matters that the dead language of war repeats itself through time. The bodies that can say nothing have the last word. What is it - the last word? No.No more war."

"Love, they say, enslaves and passion is a demon and many have been lost for love. I know this is true, but I know too that without love we grope the tunnels of our lives and never see the sun. When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself. I lifted my hand in bewilderment and felt my cheeks, my neck. This was me. And when I had looked at myself and grown accustomed to who I was, I was not afraid to hate parts of me because I wanted to be worthy of the mirror bearer."

"Examine this statement: 'A woman cannot be a poet.' Dr Samuel Johnson (Englishman 1709-84 Occupation: Language Fixer and Big Mouth.) What then shall I give up? My poetry or my womanhood?"