Hope Is Like One Of Those Orchids

If Love Is What Is Held To Make Us Immortal, Hatred Is The Reverse.

There Is A Slovenly Disrespect For Truth And Reality That Has Infected And Cross-infected The Arts; The Values Of Entertainment Are Relentlessly In The Ascendant, To The Extent That It Becomes Virtually Impossible To Write A Naturalistic Fictional Sentence Without Feeling That The Fabric Of That Sentence Is Already Compromised.

Honest Criticism, I Suppose, Has Its Place. But Honest Writing Is Infinitely More Valuable.

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.

I Was Aware, In Those Early Days Of Motherhood, That My Behaviour Was Strange To The People Who Knew Me Well. It Was As Though I Had Been Brainwashed, Taken Over By A Cult Religion. And Yet This Cult, Motherhood, Was Not A Place Where I Could Actually Live. Like Any Cult, It Demanded A Complete Surrender Of Identity To Belong To It.