I suppose one should have an integrated personality, but I've never really seen the point.

Writer's block! It doesn't exist. You just long for ideas to go away so you have an idea of peace.

I live in words. I like looking at things, but I don't have a strong visual imagination.

I do not know why it matters that I should tell the truth to myself at night, why it should matter that the truth should be spoken at least once in the world. Because the world is a place of silence, the sky at night when the birds have gone is a vast silent place. Words will make the slightest difference to the sky at night. They will not brighten it or make it less strange. And the day too has its own deep indifference to anything that is said.

The Roman Catholic Church and its rituals were so much part of life that, although my parents would often question a small matter of dogma and none of us seemed more religious than anyone else, no one ever questioned the rituals or the basic tenets of belief.

in skies of deepening blue the moon, heaven's queen was now afloat

Three of my novels and a good number of my short stories are told from the point of view of men. I was brought up in a house of women.