There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.

Knowing cats, a lifetime of cats, what is left is a sediment of sorrow quite different from that due to humans: compounded of pain for their helplessness, of guilt on behalf of us all.

It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.

Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people's company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.

Perhaps it is not such a bad marriage after all? There are innumerable marriages where two people, both twisted and wrong in their depths, are well matched, making each other miserable in the way they need, in the way the pattern of their life demands.

It's lovely to have money to give away - that's the bonus of winning the Nobel.

Little Tamar, forget the long ago. We are here and we are now, and that is all. We are making a new start.