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.

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

The essence of romantic love is that wonderful beginning, after which sadness and impossibility may become the rule.

You never know what you will learn till you start writing. Then you discover truths you never knew existed.

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

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.

The self-fulfilled woman is far from reality.