The less important you are in an office, the more they expect the happy smile.

Certainly I've never tried to imagine what the future will hold. It's a hopeless endeavor to try to do such a thing.

The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.

Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the one you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take.

I am ashamed every day, and more ashamed the next.

It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.'

If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things that others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.