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

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 like to think the price I paid by being open about my private life helped.

In my subconscious, my books were part of a single emotional journey.

What you risk reveals what you value.

I hated historical novels with fluttering cloaks.

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

I am not interested in genres. I am interested in doing the best work I can in whatever medium.

I wanted to write a new fable and see how many rules you could break.

Many people feel their outer self isn't the whole self.

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.

I think people deceive themselves about themselves, particularly as they get older.

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

Ordinary professionalism and 20 years' experience can accomplish a lot, but it can't access the hidden places.

I think we still believe that ambition is for boys.

I don't believe in happy endings.

They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?

I wanted to cause trouble, but I know now it stays with you.

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

The work that lasts over time is the work which still speaks to us when all contemporary interest in that work is extinct.

With animal behavior, they're all fine until you introduce some rogue element into the cage, and then they go crazy.

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

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

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

Confidence and superiority: It's the usual fundamentalist stuff: I've got the truth, and you haven't.

Anything outside marriage seems like freedom and excitement.

Whether you want to call it God or the mystery of the cosmos doesn't matter to me.

Everything in writing begins with language. Language begins with listening.

Naked is the best disguise.

I believe in communication; books communicate ideas and make bridges between people.

Whatever is powerful to you can be translated into something which will matter to somebody that you will never know.

I live alone, with cats, books, pictures, fresh vegetables to cook, the garden, the hens to feed.

My characters are always on the outside; the spotlight's not on them. But they do get somewhere.

I don't write for any group. I write to bring about a change in consciousness.

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

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

I think it would be very foolish not to take the irrational seriously.

There are so many separate selves; no one who writes creatively hasn't felt that.

I never cared about money.

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

Art saved me; it got me through my depression and self-loathing, back to a place of innocence.

Quest is at the heart of what I do-the holy grail, and the terror that you'll never find it, seemed a perfect metaphor for life.

One room is always enough for one person. Two rooms is not enough for two people. That is one of the conundrums in life.

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

I'm not a quitter.

If we make anything that lasts, it outlives us.

We shall all die, and our lives will be irrelevant then.

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

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.