I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing

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

I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.

[On her mother:] I was in nervous flight from her ever since I can remember anything, and from the age of fourteen I set myself obdurately against her in a kind of inner emigration from everything she represented. Girls do have to grow up, but has this battle always been so implacable?

It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.

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

I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.