There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.

How boring these emotions are that we're caught in and can't get free of, no matter how much we want to.

Women often get dropped from memory, and then history.

Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says.

The worst superstition is to consider our own tolerable.

It is quite easy to remark the absurdities and contradictions of a country's social system from outside its borders, but very difficult if one has been brought up in it.

The whole process of writing is a setting at a distance. That is the value of it - to the writer, and to the people who read the results of this process, which takes the raw, the individual, the uncriticized, the unexamined, into the realm of the general.