...or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.

It usually takes me a year to do a book. A year or eighteen months.

In fact I've reached the stage where I look at people and say - he or she, they are whole at all because they've chosen to block off at this stage or that. People stay sane by blocking off, by limiting themselves.

There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.

Knowing cats, a lifetime of cats, what is left is a sediment of sorrow quite different from that due to humans: compounded of pain for their helplessness, of guilt on behalf of us all.

I have to conclude that fiction is better at 'the truth' than a factual record.

You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.