I can't play bridge. I don't play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn't seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.

The images, the language, of pornography, and romance are alike; monotonous and mechanically seductive, quickly leading to despair.

I just believed it easily, the way you might believe and in fact remember that you once had another set of teeth, now vanished but real in spite of that. Until one day, one day when I may even have been in my teens, I knew with a dim sort of hole in my insides that now I didn't believe it anymore.

They were all in their early thirties. An age at which it is sometimes hard to admit that what you are living is your life.

I have never kept diaries. I just remember a lot and am more self-centered than most people.

Speculation can be more gentle, can take its time, when it is not driven by desire.

I loved taking off. In my own house, I seemed to be often looking for a place to hide - sometimes from the children but more often from the jobs to be done and the phone ringing and the sociability of the neighborhood. I wanted to hide so that I could get busy at my real work, which was a sort of wooing of distant parts of myself.