“I am a writer who happens to love women. I am not a lesbian who happens to write.”

“I am an ambitious writer – I don’t see the point of being anything, no, not anything at all, if you have no ambition for it.”

“It's why I am a writer...To avoid the narrow mesh of Mrs Winterson's story I had to be able to tell my own.”

“Today, the sun is everywhere, and everything solid is nothing but its own shadow, I know that the real things in life, the things I remember, the things I turn over in my hands, are not houses, bank accounts, prizes or promotions. What I remember is love -- all love -- love of this dirt road, this sunrise, a day by the river, the stranger I met in a café. Myself, even, which is the hardest thing of all to love, because love and selfishness are not the same thing. It is easy to be selfish. It is hard to love who I am. No wonder I am surprised if you do.”

“It's a symbiotic process, writing. What I am makes the books—not part of me, all of me—and then the books themselves inform the sense of what I am. So the more I can be, the better the books will be.”

“I am not tempted by God but I love his trappings.”

“To me, these days will never end. I am always there, in that room with her, or if not I, the imprint of myself - my fossil-love”