Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world.

You can't be a good person when you're writing and a bad person to your husband or a bad friend.

Maybe that was the definition of life everlasting: the belief that the next generation would carry your work forward.

I am a totally public person.

Society was nothing but a long, dull dinner party conversation in which one was forced to speak to one's partner on both the left and the right.

I love a large cast of characters. That's the way life is: it's flooded with people and we keep them all straight.

You are always someones favorite unfolding story