316 quotes found
Writer · English · 1959
English writer (born 1959)
“Wide reading is important. You don’t have to like it, but it’s important to grapple with things you don’t understand. I’ve been spending the last six months getting up an hour early to try to under...”
“You have a dress with a décolletage to emphasise your breasts. I suppose the cleavage is the proper focus but what I wanted to do was to fasten my index finger and thumb at the bolts of your collar...”
“The human heart is my territory. I write about love because it’s the most important thing in the world. I write about sex because often it feels like the most important thing in the world.”
“Examine this statement: ‘A woman cannot be a poet.’ Dr Samuel Johnson (Englishman 1709-84 Occupation: Language Fixer and Big Mouth.) What then shall I give up? My poetry or my womanhood?”
“I am sure that if we can find reconciliation with our past – whether parents, partners or friends – we should try and do that. It won't be perfect, it will be a compromise . . . but it might mean a...”
“You can’t be another person’s honesty, child, but you can be your own.”
“Unmoor the boat, we could go…downriver...History is a collection of found objects washed up through time. Goods, ideas, personalities surface towards us and then sink away and some we hook out and ...”
“Every journey conceals another journey within its lines: the path not taken and the forgotten angle.”
“There are only three possible endings —aren't there? — to any story: revenge, tragedy or forgiveness. That’s it. All stories end like that.”
“Things are continually beginning again; they’re never really resolved, you know. They are only resolved temporarily. We live in a society that peddles solutions, whether it’s solutions to those ext...”
“you act out what it feels like to be the one who doesn’t belong. And you act it out by trying to do to others what has been done to you.”
“I have ridden out all the storms,” said Shakespeare, “even the ones I wrote myself. Here, look, it begins…”
“Shakespeare,” he thought as he scribbled away. “Foolish fancy. This is life as it is lived.”
“gifts — that strange word, a signifier meaning disappointment you can hold in your hands.”
“It's true that heroes are inspiring but mustn't they also do some rescuing if they are to be worthy of their name? Would Wonder Woman matter if she only sent commiserating telegrams to the distressed?”
“Once you start recognizing your own obsessions, you know you’re getting old.”
