If I'm not working, I'm not happy. That's it. That's the prerequisite for me for happiness.

Still when I lost her, I lost sight of any landmark that might have led me someplace happier, to some more populated or congenial life.

...as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn't touch.

I'd rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones.

Being the only female in what was basically a boys’ club must have been difficult for her. Miraculously, she didn’t compensate by becoming hard or quarrelsome. She was still a girl, a slight lovely girl who lay in bed and ate chocolates, a girl whose hair smelled like hyacinth and whose scarves fluttered jauntily in the breeze. But strange and marvelous as she was, a wisp of silk in a forest of black wool, she was not the fragile creature one would have her seem.

Clearly something had gone wrong, badly, only I wasn't quite sure what—apart from knowing that I was responsible somehow, in the generalized miasma of shame and unworthiness and being-a-burden that never quite left me.

I'd been assured, at age 21 or so, by a well-known editor who saw the first part of The Secret History in what was basically its final form, that it would never be published because "no woman has ever written a successful novel from a male point of view."