No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.

He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.

You did not so much mind being -conventionally- betrayed, if you were not kept in the dark, which was humiliating, or defined only as a wife and dependent person, which was annihilating.

Don't you find it rather heavy, to have everything really in front of you – all the people who are going to matter, whom you haven't met yet, all the choices you are going to have to make, everything you might achieve, and all the possible failures – unreal now? The future flaps round my head like a cloud of midges.

When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.

I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.

I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity.