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.

Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.

There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.

When there's a war, people get married.

After a certain age - and for some of us that can be very young - there are no new people, beasts, dreams, faces, events: it has all happened before.

Free women," said Anna, wryly. She added, with an anger new to Molly, so that she earned another quick scrutinizing glance from her friend: "They still define us in terms of relationships with men, even the best of them.

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.