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“... It’s as if several layers of skin have been removed,’ I said. ‘That sounds like shingles,’ he said. ‘That’s not how I meant it,’ I said, ‘I was speaking metaphorically.’ ‘I don’t understand,’ he said, ‘can’t you put it another way?’ ‘Another way?’ I said. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I want to be able to understand.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘that’s very considerate, but unnecessary – it won’t endure ...”

“... There are​ many ‘nice’ things in Claire-Louise Bennett’s fiction. The narrator – she seems to be the same person in all twenty stories – is hardly up in the morning before the nice things press on her: ‘Sometimes a banana with coffee is nice,’ she says in ‘Morning, Noon & Night’. ‘It ought not to be too ripe – in fact there should be a definite remainder of green along the stalk, and if there isn’t, forget about it ...”

“... Claire-Louise​ Bennett is unpacking her library. Yes, she is. The books are not yet on the shelves. In fact, she doesn’t really have any shelves (she prefers to let the books pile up around her, a habit that gets her into trouble with at least one boorish lover). She has moved so often over the years that half her books are lost, having been packed into boxes and left in unremembered attics ...”

“... in a charity shop. The new edition arrives with tributes from Margaret Atwood, Eimear McBride and Claire-Louise Bennett, among others, who emphasise Dick’s status as a ‘trailblazing queer English writer’. Have other novelists been influenced by her? I prefer to think of They as inimitable: innovative in structure but stylistically old-fashioned ...”

“... there’s been a wave of enthusiasm for ‘experimental fiction’. A new crop of writers such as Claire-Louise Bennett, Kevin Davey, Will Eaves, Eimear McBride and Eley Williams, all published by independent presses, started to attract attention, and there was a flurry of excitement about writing that departed in some way from the conventions of realism ...”