As soon as a man and woman of almost any age are alone together within four walls it is assumed that anything may happen. Spontaneous combustion, instant fornication, triumph of the senses. What possibilities men and women must see in each other to infer such dangers. Or, believing in the dangers, how often they must think about the possibilities.

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

This is the way you look at the poorest details of the world resurfaced, after you've been driving for a long time -- you feel their singleness and precise location and the forlorn coincidence of you being there to see them.

You want in all cases for the story to get through the writing.

What she wants to do if she can get the time to do it, is not so much to live in the past as to open it up and get one good look at it".

I used to feel for years and years and years that I was very remiss not to have written a novel and I would question people who wrote novels and try to find out how they did it and how they had got past page 30. Then, with the approach of old age, I began to just think: “Well, lucky I can do anything at all.

You think that would have changed things? The answer is of course, and for a while, and never.