Jane Alison quotes:

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

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

That was one of the problems with the Narcissus figure. Here is a face looking at a face, and the problem is the image of the thing is never actually the thing. You try and grab it and it's not there. It's water. It disappears.

I know that I was able to find my way out of most of my feelings by writing.

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

When you're waiting for a bus, the thing to do is smoke a cigarette.

I was born in Australia and grew up in the foreign services. I had this kind of trans-Pacific life. I think I was always sort of oriented towards here's Australia and here's America and here's the Pacific.

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

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

When you get immersed in whatever you're writing, the world does suddenly get so filtered through what you're writing. And then of course what you're writing then filters the world right back.

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've always wanted to figure out how to do a walking story. I'd never figured out how to do one and have it work or be interesting or have anything that it's about.

The state of love is this constant flux back and forth between who's saving and who's rescuing, who's wanting and not wanting, who's needing and who isn't. It's always going back and forth between two people who are actually attached.

I know perfectly well that you can't not want anything and live.

You have to want something or you're finished.

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

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

Sometimes there isn't a way to hug and make everything better.

I think sometimes to still be angry is appropriate, but you want to be able to live with it.

I wouldn't underestimate the power of writing a letter.

I grew up flying over oceans and moving and sailing.

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

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

There's a quote that I learned in college a million years ago. "Happy, thought I, is the man who can, in one and the same embrace, hold both his love and the object of his love." Holding the feeling that you have and all the images that you've got and all the fantasies and romantic associations while also holding the actual core person that's been saddled with all of this.

Like a lot of writers, I just got sick to death of conventional fiction. I absolutely couldn't stand the illusion of reality and plot. I just couldn't stomach it.

I suppose you retire from trying. If you retire from trying, you think, "Maybe love will just come my way if I don't want it anymore."

I can't say that fantasy instead of the 3D world is fine or good, but I know in my own life I have certain people I've kind of fixated upon to the point of pure fantasy. Then there's such a dilemma when here they are, and they're getting ever less and less like the way the fantasy has them.