The woman who thinks she can choose femininity, can toy with it like the social drinker toys with wine – well, she’s asking for it, asking to be undone, devoured, asking to spend her life perpetrating a new fraud, manufacturing a new fake identity, only this time it’s her equality that’s fake.
Christianity has kept itself going for centuries on hope alone, and has perpetrated all manner of naughtiness in the meantime.
Even if they knew the truth of their own feelings, most mothers would be socially and emotionally incapable of revealing it.
Help is dangerous because it exists outside the human economy: the only payment for help is gratitude.
For me, a novel is always the result of my attempt to impose myself on raw circumstances. It is a concrete form of lived experience.
Feminism remains something that needs to be explained to people.
Every time I write a book, I’ve probably taken five years off my life.
It is interesting how keen people are for you to do something they would never dream of doing themselves, how enthusiasticall y they drive you to your own destruction.
My children are living, thinking human beings. It isn’t in my power to regret them, for they belong to themselves.
The British have always made terrible parents.
Shame is something you’ll find a lot of – particularly Catholic – girls feel about their bodies, about their sexuality, about their diet, about anything you like. Shame is the way you keep them down. That’s the way to crush a girl.
There are certain types of slightly hysterical human characters who, rather than creating, walk around with a sense of their own potential – it’s as if they themselves were art objects. They feel as if their lives are written narratives, or pieces of music.
To become a mother is to learn a whole language – to relearn it, perhaps, as it was the tongue to which we were born – and hence gain entrance to a forgotten world of comprehension.
Leaving things behind and starting again is a way of coping with difficulties. I learnt very early in my life that I was able to leave a place and still remain myself.
A sentence is born into this world neither good nor bad, and that to establish its character is a question of the subtlest possible adjustments, a process of intuition to which exaggeration and force are fatal.
Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative.
If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse.
The true self seeks release, not constraint. It doesnt want to be corseted in a sonnet or made to learn a system of musical notations. It wants liberation, which is why very often it fastens on the novel, for the novel seems spacious, undefined, free.
Writing, more than any other art, is indexed to the worthiness of the self because it is identified in peoples minds with emotion.
What I increasingly felt, in marriage and in motherhood, was that to live as a woman and to live as a feminist were two different and possibly irreconcilable things.