Every year, when you're a child, you become a different person.

Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind. When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.

Country manners. Even if somebody phones up to tell you your house is burning down, they ask first how you are.

I don't always, or even usually, read stories from beginning to end. I start anywhere and proceed in either direction. A story is not like a road to follow, it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while.

I sit watching the brown oceanic waves of dry country rising into the foothills and I weep monotonously, seasickly. Life is not like the dim ironic stories I like to read, it is like a daytime serial on television. The banality will make you weep as much as anything else.

I read a book called The Art of Loving. A lot of things seemed clear while I was reading it but afterwards I went back to being more or less the same.

There would never be any room in her for anything else. No room for anything but the realization of what she had done.