Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty - and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.

If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.

I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.

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

For women like me, integrity isn't chastity, it isn't fidelity, it isn't any of the old words. Integrity is the orgasm. That is something I haven't any control over.

I have a daughter and two grand-daughters and a great grandson in Africa, in Cape Town.

Anna was saying to herself: why do I always have this awful need to make other people see things as I do? It's childish, why should they? What it amounts to is that I'm scared of being alone in what I feel.