I once stole a book. It was really just the once, and at the time I called it borrowing. It was 1970, and the book, I could see by its lack of date stamps, had been lying unappreciated on the shelves of my convent school library since its publication in 1945.
Fiction leaves us so much work to do, allows the individual so much input; you have to see, you have to hear, you have to taste the madeleine, and while you are seemingly passive in your chair, you have to travel.
Fiction isn’t made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths.
Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday’s unrecollected sins.
Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.
Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people’s thoughts.
Insights don’t usually arrive at my desk, but go into notebooks when I’m on the move. Or half-asleep.
When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.
I am usually protective of my work, not showing it to anyone until it has been redrafted and polished.
For what’s the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before.
Once you’re labeled as mentally ill, and that’s in your medical notes, then anything you say can be discounted as an artefact of your mental illness.
As Danton sees it, the most bizarre aspect of Camille’s character is his desire to scribble over every blank surface; he sees a guileless piece of paper, virgin and harmless, and persecutes it till it is black with words, and then besmirches its sister, and so on, through the quire.
Those who are made can be unmade.
At New Year’s he had given Anne a present of silver forks with handles of rock crystal. He hopes she will use them to eat with, not to stick in people.
It is all very well planning what you will do in six months, what you will do in a year, but it’s no good at all if you don’t have a plan for tomorrow.
It follows that if you are not a mother you are not a grandmother. Your life has become unpunctuated, whereas the lives of other women around you have these distinct phases.
I didn’t cry much after I was 35, but staggered stony-faced into middle age, a handkerchief still in my bag just in case.
When narratives fracture, when words fail, I take consolation from the part of my life that always works: the stationery order. The mail-order stationery people supply every need from royal blue Quink to a dazzling variety of portable hard drives.
For many imaginative writers, working for the press is a fact of their life. But it’s best not to like it too much.
Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing.