Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.

To really be centered and to really work well and to think about the kinds of things that I need to think about, I need to spend large amounts of time alone.

It is easy to see things in retrospect. But I was ignorant then of everything but my own happiness, and I don’t know what else to say except that life itself seemed very magical in those days: a web of symbol, coincidence, premonition, omen. Everything, somehow, fit together; some sly and benevolent Providence was revealing itself by degrees and I felt myself trembling on the brink of a fabulous discovery, as though any morning it was all going to come together–my future, my past, the whole of my life–and I was going to sit up in bed like a thunderbolt and say oh! oh! oh!

I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.

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."

Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that's a hard lesson of reality.

Children - if you think back really what it was like to be a child and what it was like to know other children - children lie all the time