Writing novels preserves you in a state of innocence - a lot passes you by - simply because your attention is otherwise diverted.

You can never betray the people who are dead, so you go on being a public Jew; the dead can't answer slurs, but I'm here. I would love to think that Jesus wants me for a sunbeam, but he doesn't.

Good women always think it is their fault when someone else is being offensive. Bad women never take the blame for anything.

One loses the capacity to grieve as a child grieves, or to rage as a child rages: hotly, despairingly, with tears of passion. One grows up, one becomes civilized, one learns one's manners, and consequently can no longer manage these two functions - sorrow and anger - adequately.

No blame should attach to telling the truth. But it does, it does.

Fiction is the great repository of the moral sense. The wicked get punished.

I was brought up among the sort of self-important women who had a husband as one has an alibi.