You have no idea how promising the world begins to look once you have decided to have it all for yourself. And how much healthier your decisions are once they become entirely selfish.

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

When you make a break for freedom you don't necessarily find company on the way.

All good fortune is a gift of the gods, and you don't win the favor of the ancient gods by being good, but by being bold.

Life... is not simply a series of exciting new ventures. The future is not always a whole new ball game. There tends to be unfinished business. One trails all sorts of things around with one, things that simply won't be got rid of.

The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.

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