I don't think San Francisco needs defending. I never meet anyone who doesn't love the place, Americans or others.

It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.

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.

For women like me, integrity isn't chastity, it isn't fidelity, it isn't any of the old words. Integrity is the orgasm. That is something I haven't any control over.

Little Tamar, forget the long ago. We are here and we are now, and that is all. We are making a new start.

[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?

My mother died happily of a stroke in her seventies.