I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.

Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.

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

Do I do as false prophets do and puff air into simulacra? Am I a Sorcerer--like Macbeth's witches--mixing truth and lies in incandescent shapes? Or am I a kind of very minor scribe of a prophetic Book--telling such truth as in me lies, with aid of such fiction as I acknowledge mine, as Prospero acknowledged Caliban.

A beautiful woman, Simone Weil said, seeing herself in the mirror, knows "This is I." An ugly woman knows with equal certainty, "This is not I." Maud knew this neat division represented an over-simplification. The doll-mask she saw had nothing to do with her, nothing.

I don't like gurus. I don't like people who ask you to follow or believe. I like people who ask you to think independently.

You are safe with me." "I am not at all safe, with you. But I have no desire to be elsewhere.