But children can't be a center of life and a reason for being. They can be a thousand things that are delightful, interesting, satisfying, but they can't be a well-spring to live from. Or they shouldn't be.

[Some people think] that storytelling is telling jokes. So they have to be discouraged! Then others think that storytelling-is like an encounter group . . .

...or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.

You have to be grown up, really grown up, not merely in years, to understand your parents.

None of you [men] ask for anything - except everything, but just for so long as you need it.

Perhaps it is not such a bad marriage after all? There are innumerable marriages where two people, both twisted and wrong in their depths, are well matched, making each other miserable in the way they need, in the way the pattern of their life demands.

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