I have a dreadful fear that the more you try to prevent revealing the self the more you do.

Pain hardens, and great pain hardens greatly, whatever the comforters say, and suffering does not ennoble, though it may occasionally lend a certain rigid dignity of manner to the suffering frame.

Books that change you, even later in life, give you a kind of electrical shock as the world takes a different shape.

History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself.

Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy, in ways both sublime and ridiculuous, it clearly was, precisely that.

I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.

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.