Writing is a lonely job, unless you're a drinker, in which case you always have a friend within reach.
History shows that it is not only senseless and cruel, but also difficult to state who is a foreigner.
True poetry ought to be secret and clandestine, concealed like a prohibited voice of dissent, while at the same time it should speak to everyone.
It is comforting that travel should have an architecture, and that it is possible to contribute a few stones to it, although the traveller is less like one who constructs landscapes -- for that is a sedentary task -- than like one who destroys them. . . . But even destruction is a form of architecture, a deconstruction that follows certain rules and calculations, an art of disassembling and reassembling, or of creating another and different order.
Every journey is played out between standstill and flight.
I was a rebellious child, a rebellious lover, a rebellious couturière - a real devil.
The one thing an aspiring writer must understand is that it's hard. If you think it's not hard, you're not doing it right.
I've never been that person who thought that because I've written one novel, I should write another and another. It's only when there was another novel to write that I was going to write another.
Sexism in politics is nothing new when you're standing for election. But don't stand for election and it's almost as bad. Shockingly, David Cameron thought it acceptable to claim this week that my decision not to run for the Labour leadership was because my husband, Ed Balls, "stopped [me] from standing. "