For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.

Coincidences are God's way of remaining anonymous.

I write because I've always written, can't stop. I am a writing animal. The way a silk worm is a silk-producing animal.

Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: "You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do."

What I did have, which others perhaps didn't, was a capacity for sticking at it, which really is the point, not the talent at all. You have to stick at it.

I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.

...She thinks, for the hundredth time, that in their emotional life all these intelligent men use a level so much lower than anything they use for work, that they might be different creatures.