"The past is magnetic. It draws us in."

"If the demons lived anywhere it was here."

"What are you that makes me feel thus? Who are you for whom time has no meaning?"

"London is a small place, and it is very incestuous. People know where you live. Everybody is sort of on top of each other."

"Fall for me, as an apple falls, as rain falls, because you must. Use gravity to anchor your desire."

"Going mad is the beginning of a process. It is not supposed to be the end result."

"I wanted to invent myself as a fictional character. And I did, and it has caused a great deal of confusion."

"You had once asked me if I was afraid of death. I said I was afraid of not living. I don't want to eke out my life like a resource in short supply. The only selfish life is a timid one. To hold back, to withdraw, to keep the best in reserve, both overvalues the self, and undervalues what the self is."

"Love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down."

"Life gives you enough hard knocks so it's unlikely you'll stay that sure of yourself."

"Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world."

"I know from my own experience that suicide is not what it seems. Too easy to try to piece together the fragmented life. The spirit torn in bits so that the body follows."

"There is a certain seductiveness about what is dead. It will retain all those admirable qualities of life with none of that tiresome messiness associated with live things. Crap and complaints and the need for affection. You can auction it, museum it, collect it. It's much safer to be a collector of curios, because if you are curious, you have to sit and sit and see what happens. You have to wait on the beach until it gets cold, and you have to invest in a glass-bottomed boat, which is more expensive than a fishing rod, and puts you in the path of the elements. The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home, like all the men who now live with mermaids at the bottom of the sea."

"Writers have to have a knack for listening. I need to be able to hear what is being said to me by the voices I create."

"Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art... is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar... We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue."

"Earth is ancient now, but all knowledge is stored up in her. She keeps a record of everything that has happened since time began. Of time before time, she says little, and in a language that no one has yet understood. Through time, her secret codes have gradually been broken. Her mud and lava is a message from the past.Of time to come, she says much, but who listens?"

"I wasn't getting better. I was getting worse.I did not go to the doctor because I didn't want pills. If this was going to kill me then let me be killed by it. If this was the rest of my life I could not live."

"Shakespeare shook his head and sunk his chin into his ruff, making him look more owl-like than ever. "I have written about other worlds often enough. I have said what I can say. There are many kinds of reality. This is but one kind."

"To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown."

"I thought about the dog and was suddenly very sad; sad about her death, for my death, for all the inevitable dying that comes with change. There's no choice that doesn't mean a loss."

"When it is time to get to work, I go away completely and don't do anything except the work. And that can be 16 hours a day."

"I have ridden out all the storms, said Shakespeare, "even the ones I wrote myself. Here, look, it begins."

"Well done, my fine fellow out of my womb. What have you gained? Nothing! And oh, what have you lost? Everything!"

"I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line."

"You can't be another person's honesty, child, but you can be your own."

"In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn't change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie."

"If the sun is shining, stand in it- yes, yes, yes. Happy times are great, but happy times pass- they have to- because time passes. The pursuit of happiness is more elusive; it is life-long, and it is not goal-centred. What you are pursuing is meaning- a meaningful life... There are times when it will go so wrong that you will be barely alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else's terms."

"Creative work is incredibly difficult, and that is where the tests lie."

"Why is it that human beings are allowed to grow up without the necessary apparatus to make sound ethical decisions?"

"I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The smallnesss that I am. Against the daily death the iconography of wings."

"The librarian was explaining the benefits of the Dewey decimal system to her junior-benefits that extended to every area of life. It was orderly, like the universe. It had logic. It was dependable. Using it allowed a kind of moral uplift, as one's own chaos was also brought under control.'Whenever I am troubled,' said the librarian, 'I think about the Dewey decimal system.''Then what happens?' asked the junior, rather overawed.'Then I understand that trouble is just something that has been filed in the wrong place. That is what Jung was explaining of course-as the chaos of our unconscious contents strive to find their rightful place in the index of consciousness."

"I can't believe that we have reached the end of everything. The red dust is frightening. The carbon dioxide is real. Water is expensive. Bio-tech has created as many problems as it has fixed, but we're here, we're alive, we're the human race, we have survived wars and terrorism and scarcity and global famine, and we have made it back from the brink, not once but many times. History is not a suicide note - it's a record of our survival."

"I am a writer who happens to love women. I am not a lesbian who happens to write."

"A meaningless life for a human being has none of the dignity of animal unselfconsciousness; we cannot simply eat, sleep, hunt and reproduce - we are meaning-seeking creatures. The Western world has done away with religion but not with religious impulses; we seem to need some higher purpose, some point to our lives - money and leisure, social progress, are just not enough."

"Writers are not here to conform. We are here to challenge. We're not here to be comfortable-we're here, really, to shake things up. That's our job."

"You have a dress with a décolletage to emphasize your breasts. I suppose the cleavage is the proper focus, but what I wanted to do was fasten my index finger and thumb at the bolts of your collarbone, push out, spreading the web of my hand until it caught against your throat. You asked me if I wanted to strangle you. No, I wanted to fit you—not just in the obvious ways but in so many indentations."

"Destiny is a worrying concept. I don't want to be fated, I want to choose."

"There's no such thing as effortless beauty--you should know that.There's no effort which is not beautiful--lifting a heavy stone or loving you.Loving you is like lifting a heavy stone. It would be easier not to do it and I'm not quite sure why I am doing it. It takes all my strength and all my determination, and I said I wouldn't love someone again like this. Is there any sense in loving someone you can only wake up to by chance?"

"To me, life, for all its privations, is a luminous thing. You have to risk it."

"If there was an elephant in the supermarket, she'd either not see it at all, or call it Mrs Jones and talk about fishcakes."

"Eating words and listening to them rumbling in the gut is how a writer learns the acid and alkali of language. It is a process at the same time physical and intellectual. The writer has to hear language until she develops perfect pitch, but she also has to feel language, to know it sweat and dry. The writer finds the words are visceral, and when she can eat them, wear them, and enter them like tunnels she discovers the alleged separation between word and meaning between writer and word is theoretical."

"Perhaps it is worse when love has flowed freely to find it one day dammed."

"There are two kinds of writing the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don't want to go. You look where you don't want to look."

"You play. You win. You play. You lose. You play."

"I didn't mind being unpopular at school, because everyone else was a heathen."

"There are only three possible endings -aren't there? - to any story: revenge, tragedy or forgiveness. That's it. All stories end like that."

"Children do not find fault with their parents until later. In the beginning, the love you get is the love that sets."

"Language is a finding-place not a hiding place."

"We heal up through being loved, and through loving others. We don't heal by forming a secret society of one - by assessing about the only other 'one' we might admit, and being doomed to disappointment."

"I know now, after fifty years, that the finding/losing, forgetting/remembering, leaving/returning, never stops. The whole of life is about another chance, and while we are alive, till the very end, there is always another chance."