Literature is analysis after the event.

[On her mother:] I was in nervous flight from her ever since I can remember anything, and from the age of fourteen I set myself obdurately against her in a kind of inner emigration from everything she represented. Girls do have to grow up, but has this battle always been so implacable?

I think kids ought to travel. I think it's very good to carry kids around. It's good for them. Of course it's tough on the parents.

What I did have, which others perhaps didn't, was a capacity for sticking at it, which really is the point, not the talent at all. You have to stick at it.

I write because I've always written, can't stop. I am a writing animal. The way a silk worm is a silk-producing animal.

The current publishing scene is extremely good for the big, popular books. They sell them brilliantly, market them and all that. It is not good for the little books. And really valuable books have been allowed to go out of print. In the old days, the publishers knew that these difficult books, the books that appeal only to a minority, were very productive in the long run. Because they're probably the books that will be read in the next generation.

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