I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.

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.

You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.

What I really can't stand about the feminist revolution is that it produced some of the smuggest, most unselfcritical people the world has ever seen. They are horrible.

I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'

Nicknames are potent ways of cutting people down to size.

Argument does not teach children or the immature. Only time and experience does that.