It's certainly true that when I was young, writing seemed to me so important that I would have sacrificed almost anything to it ... Because I thought of the world in which I wrote -- the world I created -- as somehow much more enormously alive than the world I was actually living in.

Love removes the world for you, and just as surely when it's going well as when it's going badly.

What she felt was a lighthearted sort of compassion, almost like laughter. A swish of tender hilarity, getting the better of all her sores and hollows, for the time given.

For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel.

Why is it a surprise to find that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?

Anecdotes don't make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.

I despised their antics because I took life seriously and had a much more lofty and tender notion of romance. But I would have liked to get their attention just the same.