Open a book this minute and start reading. Don’t move until you’ve reached page fifty. Until you’ve buried your thoughts in print. Cover yourself with words. Wash yourself away. Dissolve.

This is why I read novels: so I can escape my own unrelenting monologue.

I couldn't have been a novelist without being a mother. It gives you a unique witness point of the growth of a personality. It was a kind of biological component for me that had to come first. My children gave this other window on the world.

The larger loneliness of our lives evolves from our unwillingness to spend ourselves, stir ourselves. We are always damping down our inner weather, permitting ourselves the comforts of postponement, of rehearsals

Here's to another year and let's hope it's above ground.

Words are our life. We are human because we use language. So I think we are less human when we use less language.

So this is where the years of maturity deliver us - to this needy, selfish, unwieldy wish to be somebody else's first and primal other.