“As it has turned out, the whole relationship between men, women and children has tilted, to the disadvantage of women.”

“I do use husbands a bit (in books). It's what writers of this kind do, actually. I am quite careful to try to keep the family out of my writing. You find, on the whole, that men will forgive you everything if you say they are good in bed and the women if you say they are beautiful. It's the way to turn away wrath.”

“It seemed to me when I wrote The Life and Loves of a She-Devil that women were so much in the habit of being good it would do nobody any harm if they learned to be a little bad - that is to say, burn down their houses, give away their children, put their husband in prison, steal his money and turn themselves into their husband's mistress.”

“The insistence that somehow women are an endangered species that needs to be protected at all costs seems to me to be contrary to what's desirable for their view of themselves. And it just invests far more power in the male than is necessary.”

“One must be careful with words. Words turn probabilities into facts and by sheer force ofdefinition translate tendencies into habits.”

“What happens now is that if some unfortunate man goes to bed with some woman, overnight there's a divorce. He thinks and feels about the authenticity of his being, then they have to get married. So they just end up having serial marriages, which is distressing for the children. It would be much better if people just put up with the guilt of having erred and shut up.”

“She could see that to lose a sibling was hard: it could only seem unnatural:out of time, out of order, a vicious re-run of your own departure into nothingness.”