“Before Octavia was born, I used to think that love bore some relation to merit and to beauty, but now I saw that this was not so.”

“What really annoys me are the ones who write to say, I am doing your book for my final examinations and could you please tell me what the meaning of it is. I find it just so staggering--that you're supposed to explain the meaning of your book to some total stranger! If I knew what the meanings of my books were, I wouldn't have bothered to write them.”

“I actually remember feeling delight, at two o'clock in the morning, when the baby woke for his feed, because I so longed to have another look at him.”

“Auntie Phyl's last months in the care home were extra pieces. Age is unnecessary. Some of us, like my mother, are fortunate enough to die swiftly and suddenly, in full possession of our faculties and our fate, but more and more of us will be condemned to linger, at the mercy of anxious or indifferent relatives, careless strangers, unwanted medical interventions, increasing debility, incontinence, memory loss. We live too long, but, like the sibyl hanging in her basket in the cave at Cumae, we find it hard to die.”

“I need words and print... I need print like an addict. I could live without it, perhaps. But I hope I never have to try.”

“I'd rather be at the end of a dying tradition, which I admire, than at the beginning of a tradition which I deplore.”

“Lucky in work, unlucky in love.”