Independent Women Must Expect More Of Themselves,

In My Mind's Eye Shakespeare Is A Huge, Hot Sea-beast, With Fire In His Veins And Ice On His Claws And Inscrutable Eyes, Who Looks Like An Inchoate Hump Under The Encrustations Of Live Barnacle-commentaries, Limpets And Trailing Weeds.

There Are Many Ways Of Writing Badly About Painting... There Is An 'appreciative' Language Of Threadbare, Not Inaccurate, But Overexposed And Irritating Words... The Language Of The Schools Which 'situates' Works And Artists In Schools And Movements... Novelists And Poets [that] See Paintings As Allegories Of Writing.

On Buses And Trains, I Always Think About The Inexhaustible Variety Of Human Genes. We See Types, And Occasionally Twins, But Never Doubles. All Faces Are Unique, And This Is Exhilarating, Despite The Increasingly Plastic Similarity Of Tv Stars And Actors.

I Think The Virtue I Prize Above All Others Is Curiosity. If You Look Really Hard At Almost Anybody, And Try To See Why They're Doing What They're Doing, Taking A Dig At Them Ceases To Be What You Want To Do Even If You Hate Them.

In England, Everyone Believes If You Think, Then You Don't Feel. But All My Novels Are About Joining Together Thinking And Feeling.