The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.

She was thirty-nine. No, she did not envy her eighteen-year- old self at all. But she did envy, envied every day more bitterly, that young girl's genuine independence, largeness, scope, and courage.

Anna, there's something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right.

The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.

When I started, there were no big interviews, no television, no profiles and all that. The publishers were quite shockingly uncommercial, but they did look after their writers.

Capable people do not understand incapacity; clever people do not understand stupidity.

One certainty we all accept is the condition of being uncertain and insecure.