To become a mother is to learn a whole language - to relearn it, perhaps, as it was the tongue to which we were born - and hence gain entrance to a forgotten world of comprehension.

Hope is like one of those orchids that grows around toxic waste: lovely in itself - and an assertion, if you like, of indefatigable good - but a sure sign that something nasty lies underneath.

As writers go, I have a skin of average thickness. I am pleased by a good review, disappointed by a bad. None of it penetrates far enough to influence the thing I write next.

That's writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn't turn up.

How can there be so many mothers in the world but so little sense of what it might be to become one?

The creativity of childhood was often surrendered amid feelings of unworthiness. So the idea that ­others are demanding to be given it back - to be "taught" - is disturbing.

Childhood, after all, is not an ending, but rather a state full of potent curiosity.

Even if they knew the truth of their own feelings, most mothers would be socially and emotionally incapable of revealing it.

Honest criticism, I suppose, has its place. But honest writing is infinitely more valuable.

Hope is one of those no-win-no-fee things, and although it needs some encouragement to survive, its existence doesn't necessarily prove anything.

People are least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them.

...someone ought to invent a tool, a kind of plane to shave the lies away from stories and deception away from memories. I'm a collector of shavings.

90% of all failures in life are those who have the habit of making excuses.

If religious beliefs and opinions are found contrary to the standards of science they are mere superstitions and imaginations.

I think that Donald Trump is coming to this office with fewer set hard-and-fast policy prescriptions than a lot of other presidents might be arriving with.

We have to allow ourselves to see what there is to see, and we have to imagine.

The sea is the same as it has been since before men ever went on it in boats.

I think there's something inherently dishonest in trying to go back and mess with the past.

The standpoint of the man who relies on religious experience for capturing Reality must always remain individual and incommunicable.

Noting his mother's visit to Las Vegas the weekend before she died. She got to go to heaven four days early.