Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.
Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens.
And yet the work is fabulous because it's so cleanly and beautifully imagined and it takes all of us into strange places.
Animal desire, girls lose quickly. They're just as likely to want sex for its own sake, but get tricked out of it.
Anything outside marriage seems like freedom and excitement.
Art saved me; it got me through my depression and self-loathing, back to a place of innocence.
Confidence and superiority: It's the usual fundamentalist stuff: I've got the truth, and you haven't.
Creative work is incredibly difficult, and that is where the tests lie.
Everything in writing begins with language. Language begins with listening.
God, I shouldn't have asked where you live; I promise not to turn up on your doorstep.
However it is debased or misinterpreted, love is a redemptive feature. To focus on one individual so that their desires become superior to yours is a very cleansing experience.
I am a writer who happens to love women. I am not a lesbian who happens to write.
I am extremely clean and neat at all times.
I am not interested in genres. I am interested in doing the best work I can in whatever medium.
I believe in communication; books communicate ideas and make bridges between people.
I didn't mind being unpopular at school, because everyone else was a heathen.
I don't believe in happy endings.
I don't read reviews because by then it's too late - whatever anyone says, the book won't change. It is written.
I don't understand why people talk of art as a luxury when it's a mind-altering possibility.
I don't write for any group. I write to bring about a change in consciousness.
I had a recurring dream of skiing downhill and my skis coming apart and tearing me in two.
I had relationships with men as well as women. I wasn't choosing; I didn't think I had to.
I hate the word lesbian; it tells you nothing; its only purpose is to inflame.
I hated historical novels with fluttering cloaks.
I like to look at how people work together when they are put into stressful situations, when life stops being cozy.
I like to think the price I paid by being open about my private life helped.
I live alone, with cats, books, pictures, fresh vegetables to cook, the garden, the hens to feed.
I look down over the river, which is soothing and energizing at the same time.
I need to have that full intensity. I need to go out there with all the power I've got.
I never cared about money.
I never wanted children. If I'd been deeply in love with a man and he'd wanted children, it would have been difficult.
I think heterosexuality and homosexuality are a kind of psychosis, and the truth is somewhere in the middle.
I think it would be very foolish not to take the irrational seriously.
I think people deceive themselves about themselves, particularly as they get older.
I think we still believe that ambition is for boys.
I want to be part of Europe, not America; if Britain isn't going to be, I'm leaving.
I wanted this great weight of material to perform quantum work within the narrative and lift and let the thing float upwards.
I wanted to cause trouble, but I know now it stays with you.
I wanted to invent myself as a fictional character. And I did, and it has caused a great deal of confusion.
I wanted to write a new fable and see how many rules you could break.
I went from being published in eight to 19 countries.
I'm glad I've been part of changing attitudes. With gay pride, the community needed people who were known and would stand up.
I'm lucky I have a fantastic life. I've found it again, like coming back from the dead.
I'm not a quitter.
I'm not certain where I am now; transitions are best done on your own.
I've got a cottage on my land. It's important to lift out of a domestic space. I can't have it around me.
I've never known my father happy before. We'll never be close, but when he does die, there won't be unfinished business.
If we make anything that lasts, it outlives us.
If you continually write and read yourself as a fiction, you can change what's crushing you.
In my subconscious, my books were part of a single emotional journey.
It is helpful for a woman artist not to have a husband.
Life gives you enough hard knocks so it's unlikely you'll stay that sure of yourself.
London is a small place, and it is very incestuous. People know where you live. Everybody is sort of on top of each other.
Many people feel their outer self isn't the whole self.
My books always begin with a sentence and an image - not necessarily connected.
My characters are always on the outside; the spotlight's not on them. But they do get somewhere.
My friends and the people who are close to me know what I am. And that is enough.
Naked is the best disguise.
Nobody knows anything about Shakespeare the person. It's all legend, it is all rumor.
Now everywhere's owned by someone.
One room is always enough for one person. Two rooms is not enough for two people. That is one of the conundrums in life.
Ordinary professionalism and 20 years' experience can accomplish a lot, but it can't access the hidden places.
Quest is at the heart of what I do-the holy grail, and the terror that you'll never find it, seemed a perfect metaphor for life.
Take the plays of Shakespeare: Those plays cannot possibly have come out of Shakespeare's life.
The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home.
The work that lasts over time is the work which still speaks to us when all contemporary interest in that work is extinct.
There are so many separate selves; no one who writes creatively hasn't felt that.
They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?
This mapping of the heart, the inner territory, is so complex.
To create a past that seemed authentic but would be a fiction, you need an invented language.
To me, life, for all its privations, is a luminous thing. You have to risk it.
We shall all die, and our lives will be irrelevant then.
What you risk reveals what you value.
What's invisible to us is also crucial for our own well-being.
Whatever is powerful to you can be translated into something which will matter to somebody that you will never know.
When I had no money, I used to borrow other people's spaces, or rent cheap rooms.
When I'm doing my work, I'm down there for hours and hours.
When it is time to get to work, I go away completely and don't do anything except the work. And that can be 16 hours a day.
Whether you want to call it God or the mystery of the cosmos doesn't matter to me.
With animal behavior, they're all fine until you introduce some rogue element into the cage, and then they go crazy.
Writers have to have a knack for listening. I need to be able to hear what is being said to me by the voices I create.
You can't have everybody going for each other's throats all the time because the whole social fabric breaks down.
You just have to think, what is important?
You never give away your heart; you lend it from time to time. If it were not so, how could we take it back without asking?
You play. You win. You play. You lose. You play.
Your weak point is the open, vulnerable place where you can always be hurt. Love, in all its aspects, opens the self so fully.
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