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

I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing

Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.

There is a whole generation of women and it was as if their lives came to a stop when they had children. Most of them got pretty neurotic - because, I think, of the contrast between what they were taught at school they were capable of being and what actually happened to them.

He destroyed in her the knowing, doubting, sophisticated Ella, and again and again he put her intelligence to sleep, and with her willing connivance, so that she floated darkly on her love for him, on her naivety, which is another word for a spontaneous creative faith. And when his own distrust of himself destroyed this woman-in-love, so that she began thinking, she would fight to return to naivety.

I'll be pleased when I'm dead. That will let me off worrying about all these wars.

Don't read a book out of its right time for you.