Marina Warner

"The sombre-suited masculine world of the Protestant religion is altogether too much like a gentlemen's club to which the ladies are only admitted on special days."

"When virtue is pictured as innocence and innocence equated with childlikeness, the implication is obviously that knowledge and experience are no longer media of goodness, but have become in themselves contaminating. This is a very despairing outlook, in its way as black as Augustine's original sin, for it supposes that original goodness will in all likelihood be defiled…It surrenders the attempt to represent virtue in a mature phase."

"Creating simplicity often makes the heart leap; order has been restored, the crooked made straight. But order is understanding that things cannot be made simple, that complexity reigns and must be accepted."

"Wonder has no opposite; it springs up already doubled in itself, compounded of dread and desire at once, attraction and recoil, producing a thrill, the shudder of pleasure and of fear."

"Regarding Salman Rushdie, the official reason given was that speaking up for the rights of a writer to free expression would offend some of our members and Fellows and that the RSL is not a political body [...] This attitude produces the odd situation that one of the few places in the UK where a writer can’t express their views is their own Society."