Quotes

There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.

I don't like gurus. I don't like people who ask you to follow or believe. I like people who ask you to think independently.

I grew up with that completely fictive idea of motherhood, where the mother never strayed from the kitchen. All the women in my books are very afraid that if they do anything with their minds they won't be complete women. I don't think my daughters' generation has that feeling.

One of the reasons I've gotten so attached to talking to scientists is that... they know there is a reality.

I always say I write my own novels and the characters don't take control of me, but in fact, I look at the characters in the early stages and I think, 'What is he or she like,' and they slowly come together and they become the person they are.

When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.

You learn different things through fiction. Historians are always making a plot about how certain things came to happen. Whereas a novelist looks at tiny little things and builds up a sort of map, like a painting, so that you see the shapes of things.

I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.

I think literary theory has not been terribly good for English studies in a while. It's not that theory isn't interesting, but it isn't about books, or the idiosyncrasies and complexities of putting language together.

I think there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me.

I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.

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.

I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me, but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.

The point of painting is not really deception or imitation.

If a novelist tells you something she knows or thinks, and you believe her, that is not because either of you think she is God, but because she is doing her work - as a novelist.

Books that change you, even later in life, give you a kind of electrical shock as the world takes a different shape.

You learn a lot about love before you ever get there. You learn at least as much about love from books as you do from watching your parents.

Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.

The true exercise of freedom is - cannily and wisely and with grace - to move inside what space confines - and not seek to know what lies beyond and cannot be touched or tasted.

It's because I'm a feminist that I can't stand women limiting other women's imaginations. It really makes me angry.

Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.

I am suspicious of writers who go looking for issues to address. Writers are neither preachers nor journalists. Journalists know much more than most writers about what's going on in the world. And if you want to change things, you do journalism.

I think my characters with my fingers, I think my characters with my guts. But when I say I think them, that is what I do, I feel them with the sympathetic neurons and I work out with my brain what it is that I am trying to write about, or I can't do it.

For a long time, I felt instinctively irritated - sometimes repelled - by scientific friends' automatic use of the word 'mechanism' for automatic bodily processes. A machine was man-made; it was not a sentient being; a man was not a machine.

I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.