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.

There are chapters in every life which are seldom read and certainly not aloud.

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.

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.

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

The scolding voice is her own, so abrasive and quick, yet so powerless to move her.

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