I would really hope this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something you played around with until you got a novel.

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

In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.

The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming.

His face contained for me all possibilities of fierceness and sweetness, pride and submissiveness, violence, self-containment. I never saw more in it than I had when I saw it first, because I saw everything then. The whole thing in him that I was going to love, and never catch or explain.

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.

There were people whom you positively ached to please. If you failed with such people they would put you into a category in their minds where they could kee you and have contempt for you forever.