I was at a party in 1989 and Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie were sitting on a sofa wondering where the next generation of great British writers would come from. As we talked, it became clear they had never read a word by me.

The school song at Accrington High School for Girls was 'Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,' a terrible choice for an all-girls' school, but one that helped turn me into a feminist. Where were the famous women--indeed any women--and why weren't we praising them? I vowed to myself that I would be famous and that I would come back and be praised.

The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home, like all the men who now live with mermaids at the bottom of the sea.Or the people who found Atlantis.

I may not spare you," I said. "For I would rather spare all those who would come into contact with you, were you to be left alive.

Books, for me, are a home. Books don't make a home - they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and space.There is warmth there too - a hearth. I sit down with a book and I'm warm.

The photographer frames the shot, writers frame their world.

Love is vivid. I never wanted the pale version.. Love is full strenght. I never wanted the diluted version. I never shied away from love's hugeness but I had no idea that love could be as reliable as the sun. The daily rising of love.

Oxford was not a conspiracy of silence as far as women were concerned; it was a conspiracy of ignorance.

Saddest of all are the woman who were brought up to believe that self-sacrifice is the highest female virtue.