Writer

My nature is feminist. How could you not be a feminist and be alive? The world is full of brilliant, interesting women.

The things in life which try to pin us down are the things we have to try to work against.

I wouldn't call my work Modernist. I would rust if I try to think about labels. I'd feel like the Tin Man in 'The Wizard of Oz.'

You never know what you're going to end up with when you sit down to write something. At the end, if it holds, it can do this multifarious thing - which is to open things rather than close them, to make them bigger rather than smaller, to cross those divides which we live every day of our lives.

People tend to see modernism as the opposite of a celebration. They see it as a fracturing and an art built round an absence, but it's really a celebration of our existence.

What's the point of art, of any art, if it doesn't let us see with a little bit of objectivity where we are?

Short stories consume you faster. They're connected to brevity. With the short story, you are up against mortality. I know how tough they are as a form, but they're also a total joy.

I really like jackets and tend to buy them to the detriment of my need of all the other items.

If you can read the world as a construct, you can ask questions of the construct, and you can suggest ways to change the construct.

Fashion is fickle, and I was published because I was fashionable. Because I was gay.

The rhythmical unit of the syllable is at the back of all of it - the word, the phrase, the sentence, the syntax, the paragraph, and the way the heart moves when you read it.

All we need to do, reader or writer, from first line to final page, is be as open as a book, and be alive to the life in language - on all its levels.

There's a point at which we make our lives, but we also take the path which is given to us.

When you fall in love with a book, something especially interesting and exciting is happening because of the way language works on us as human beings. And I love language.

Art is one of the prime ways we have of opening ourselves and going beyond ourselves. That's what art is: it's the product of the human being in the world and imagination, all coming together.

I'm blessed in my good friends, and some of them happen to be writers, though that's almost never what our friendships are about. And every writer I've ever read, living or dead, has in one way or another helped and inspired. I have a feeling it's important not to mix the two up.

Love and the imagination are connected.

I have a theory, now - that the whole of the Renaissance was peopled with girls dressed as boys so they could make art.

It's the word 'artful'; it's such a great word, with its dark and its light side, its art and its cunning, the craft and the crafty of it - I've been preoccupied with the word 'artful' and the twin notions of 'cornucopia' and 'pickpocket' it suggests for quite some time.

The world asks us to be quickly readable, but the thing about human beings is that we are more than one thing. We are multiple selves. We are massively contradictory.