My first memory is on a ship from California back to Sydney. Water is just a natural place of home and not home.

Teaching writing puts you on the point of a pin in terms of what you want your own writing to be.

I sometimes think that we expect too much resolution in this world.

Early in the phase of being in a female body, there's all this desire that comes at you, a lot of it hostile, a lot of it dangerous, a lot of it ruinous.

I do some messing around with things, not necessarily about me but about place and people and the things around.

I grew up flying over oceans and moving and sailing.

There's a lot of water in everything I've ever written. There's always oceans and pools.

You can sometimes find something good on the other side of doing something very, very painful.

In order to have a real life of any romance, there has to be a level of fantasy.

I don't think you can have an imagination without having fantasy, and you can't have that rich a life without an imagination.

That's what perfect means. You're finished.

It is useful to study different traditions in order to be free of attachment to any one way of expressing what is beyond expression. (x)

Having and understanding of the 'why' will help having an understanding of the 'how'.

John’s standard maneuver to ask someone to help him, especially in a moment of crisis,

We are bound to meet wrong things for wrong things are bound to meet us but, when things go wrong, don't be wrong, let things be wrong

People give out compliments because it's polite.

Truth is, of course, relative. But then, so is relative.

The most important thing is to write in your own blood. I bare intimate feelings because people should know how other people feel.

It is more difficult by far to be independent of our own inner shackles than it is of the shackles that others might place upon us.

It's God - I recognised him from Blake's picture.

Nothing happens to you that has not happened to someone else.