Nothing fails like failure

When nothing is sure, everything is possible.

How unjust life is, to make physical charm so immediately apparent or absent, when one can get away with vices untold for ever.

Family life itself, that safest, most traditional, most approved of female choices, is not a sanctuary: It is, perpetually, a dangerous place.

Scenery can be a violent stimulant.

Lord knows what incommunicable small terrors infants go through, unknown to all.

Novels, since the birth of the genre, have been full of rejected, seduced, and abandoned maidens, whose proper fate is to die.

The human mind can bear plenty of reality but not too much intermittent gloom.

The women are always vixens or monsters. They can't just be normal people in the book.

Why can't people be both flexible and efficient?

Perhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it.

We cannot own each other, Bo. We can only offer what is ours to give.

Face it and it will be less …

I can't say with certitude.

My own mum cared about Hollywood, and I didn't. I wanted to act, and I loved the creativity of it, but I didn't care for the lifestyle.

I studied piano for many years, and I still play. I'm a complete amateur, and I wouldn't consider myself very good at all, but I enjoy it.

I've been writing for a long time. I sat down to write my first novel in the middle of March of 1982.

I would like people to see my work as a rehabilitation of scorned values and, in any case, make no mistake about it, a work of ardent celebration.

Only through hardship, sacrifice and militant action can freedom be won. The struggle is my life. I will continue fighting for freedom until the end of my days.

Reading is like breathing. If you take it away, first I become antsy, then violent.

I try to do as little as possible without looking like an idiot. Research is fun and easy. Writing is hard. So I try not to let the research become an excuse to not do the writing part.