I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.

You have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.

Advice to young writers? Always the same advice: learn to trust our own judgment.

Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people's company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.

If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.

Anna was saying to herself: why do I always have this awful need to make other people see things as I do? It's childish, why should they? What it amounts to is that I'm scared of being alone in what I feel.

I'm sure that everybody feels a kind of permanent anguish about what's going on in the world.