People who wrote literary novels about the past probably didn't want them pegged as historical fiction. Certainly that was true in England.

I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only.

It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.

Fortitude. ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.

Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried.

Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.

If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.

The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it.

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.

You're only young once, they say, but doesn't it go on for a long time? More years than you can bear.

A system is corrupt when it is strictly profit-driven, not driven to serve the best interests of its people, but those of multinational corporations.

I can get on with wild beasts first-rate

I'm not that lazy, but I don't need that much money. I lead a fairly simple life.

I consider myself lucky to have had wonderful teachers. They expose you to a lot and basically teach you how to paint. I think of my career as a series of lucky incidents.

In the midst of creating, a person is raised to another level of consciousness that doesn't have that much to do with everyday thinking. It's as if you could imagine life before there were words.

If there's anyone still present whom I've failed to insult . . . I apologize.

There's such a sense of theatre in getting glammed up; it's like putting on a play or short film.

Whether we think we can or cannot, we are right.

I tried making an album six years ago. It was just horrific. Trust me, it's smashed into smithereens. I paid big money to silence that one.

To make your life being a writer, it's an auto-slavery ... you are both the slave and the task-master.