Shuttered like a fan no-one suspects your shoulder blades of wings.
The pain is when the dreams change, as they do, as they must.
I write about sex because often it feels like the most important thing in the world.
The truth is I am inventing the maybe. I can only make the choices I make, so why torture myself with what I might have done, when all I can handle is what I have done? The Maybe Islands are hostile to human life.
Only the impossible is worth the effort.
True stories are the ones that lie open at the border, allowing a crossing, a further frontier. The final frontier is just science fiction – don’t believe it. Like the universe, there is no end.
Everything is imprinted for ever with what it once was.
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.
Children, I suppose, are always unfinished business: they begin as part of your own body, and continue as separate as another continent.
Life gives you enough hard knocks so it’s unlikely you’ll stay that sure of yourself.
Nobody knows anything about Shakespeare the person. It’s all legend, it is all rumor.
Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there.
Freud, one of the grand masters of narrative, knew that the past is not fixed in the way that linear time suggests. We can return. We can pick up what we dropped. We can mend what others broke. We can talk with the dead.
We fear passion and laugh at too much love and those who love too much. And still we long to feel.
I don’t believe in happy endings.
It is helpful for a woman artist not to have a husband.
I’m not club-able, you see. I don’t like literary parties and literary gatherings and literary identities. I’d hate to join anything, however loosely.
I have no idea what happens next.
What would it have meant to be happy? What would it have meant if things had been bright, clear, good between us?
We don’t go to Shakespeare to find out about life in Elizabethan England; we go to Shakespeare to find out about ourselves now.