Independent women must expect more of themselves, since neither men nor other more conventionally domesticated women will hope for anything, or expect any result other than utter failure.

I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.

Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.

I don't see much point in doing things for a pure joke. Every now and then you need a joke, but not so much as the people who spend all their lives constructing joke palaces think you do.

A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children.

I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful.

There are things that happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken or written of, though it would be very wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such things had never been.