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.

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

Lovers. Not a soft word, as people thought, but cruel and tearing.

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

People have thoughts they’d sooner not have. It happens in life.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

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.