“A heartless hand on my shoulderA push and it's overAlabaster crashes downSix months is a long timeTried living in the real worldInstead of a shellBut before I began I was bored before I even began”

“Tried living in the real world instead of a shell, but I was bored before I even began.”

“I exaggerated even before I began to exaggerate, because it's true — nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be.”

“I have so little control over the act of writing that it's all I can do to remain conscious. Actual formal considerations are almost beyond my capacity. Before I sat down and became a writer, before I began to do it habitually and for my living, there was a decades-long stretch when I was terrified that it would suck, so I didn't write. I think that marks a lot of people, a real terror at being bad at something, and unfortunately you are always bad before you can get a little better.”

“As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs...The way I write is who I am, or have become...”

“I thought I had been a suffragist before I became a Poor Law Guardian, but now I began to think about the vote in women's hands not only as a right but as a desperate necessity.”