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.

My mother was a woman who was very frustrated. She had a great deal of ability, and all this energy went into me and my brother.

Writers do not come out of houses without books.

My father was always so mingled with rage at his life.

I was filled with such a dangerous delicious intoxication that I could have walked straight off the steps into the air, climbing on the strength of my own drunkeness into the stars. And the intoxication, as I knew even then, was the recklessness of infinite possibility.

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

Charity has always been a expression of the guilty consciences of a ruling class.