Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing.

I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only.

It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.

Fortitude. ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.

Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried.

Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.

If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.

The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it.

I didn't cry much after I was 35, but staggered stony-faced into middle age, a handkerchief still in my bag just in case.

You're only young once, they say, but doesn't it go on for a long time? More years than you can bear.

Your mind is the doorkeeper of your soul and heart the king. It's unwise to let the doorkeeper control the king.

When do we stop crying over our own injuries? When we get old enough to swallow our tears, or when the people we love stop responding to our cries of pain?

Action, like a sacrament, is the visible form of an invisible spirit, an outward manifestation of an inward power.

Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.

The thirst for equality can express itself either as a desire to draw everyone down to one's level, or to raise oneself and everyone else up.

Consciousness is a being the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being.

Right now I'm 185, which is really good for me yet very hard for me to maintain. My weight seems high for the average woman, but I've got big bones and I'm maintaining muscle.

I speak and speak, [...] but the listener retains only the words he is expecting. [...] It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.

I am religious in the sense that I believe in God and I believe that there is an abiding logical spirit that controls what goes on to a certain extent.

I was never meant to sit at home.