I am beginning to respect the apathetic days. Perhaps they're a necessary pause: better to give in to them than to fight them at your desk hopelessly; then you lose both the day and your self-respect. Treat them as physical phenomena -- casually -- and obey them.

It is the striving after perfection that makes one an artist. It is the sense that one is imperfect, unfulfilled, unfinished. One attempts by a superhuman effort to fill the gap, to leap over it, to finish it in another medium. And one creates a third and separate thing: 'Adventure rarely reaches its predetermined end. Columbus never reached China. But he discovered America.

Woman's normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life, or saintly life.

Perhaps middle-age is, or should be, a period of shedding shells; the shell of ambition, the shell of material accumulations and possessions, the shell of the ego.

It is a difficult lesson to learn today-to leave one's friends and family and deliberately practice the art of solitude for an hour or a day or a week. And yet, once it is done, I find there is a quality to being alone that is incredibly precious. Life rushes back into the void, richer, more vivid, fuller than before.

I had the feeling . . . that my experience was very different from other people’s. (Are we all under this illusion?)

My father taught me that a bill is like a crying baby and has to be attended to at once.