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...
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 pub...
Autobiography is not important. Authenticity is important. The writer must fire herself through the text, be the molten stuff that welds together disparate elements. I believe there is always exposure...
The light was as intense as a love affair. I was blinded, delighted, not just because it was warm and wonderful, but because nature measures nothing. Nobody needs this much sunlight. Nobody needs drou...
Every moment you steal from the present is a moment you've lost forever. There is only now.
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.
There is always a city. There is always a civilisation. There is always a barbarian with a pickaxe. Sometimes you are the city, sometimes you are the civilisation, but to become that city, that civili...
There is a certain seductiveness about dead things. You can ill treat, alter and recolour what's dead. It won’t complain.
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.Or the people who found Atlantis.
Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open - the only way to stop the story from running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wan...
Q: How do you fall in love?
It seems so easy now to destroy libraries--mainly by taking away all the books--and to say that books and libraries are not relevant to people's lives. There's a lot of talk about social breakdown and...
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 there's such a thing as spiritual adultery, my mother was a whore.
I've always tried to make a home for myself, but I have not felt at home myself. I've worked hard at being the hero of my own life. But every time I checked the register of displaced persons, I was s...
Children do not find fault with their parents until later. In the beginning, the love you get is the love that sets.
All of one’s life is a struggle towards that; the narrow path between freedom and belonging. I have sometimes sacrificed freedom in order to belong, but more often I have given up all hope of belongin...
Part broken - part whole, you begin again. ( from 'Why books seem shockproof against change.' THE TIMES: BOOKS)
Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.