Perhaps too much of everything is as bad as too little.

People permit life to slide past them like a deft pickpocket, their purse-not yet missed and now too late-in his hand.

I'm tired of hearing you men say that this and that and the other isn't woman's work. Any work is woman's work that a woman can do well.

A writer's working hours are his waking hours. He is working as long as he is conscious and frequently when he isn't.

Take Texas the way Texas takes bourbon. Straight. It goes down easier.

The writer is a writer because he cannot help it. It is a compulsion.

I sat staring up at a shelf in my workroom from which thirty-one books identically dressed in neat dark green leather stared back at me with a sort of cold hostility like children who resent their parents. Don't stare at us like that! they said. Don't blame us if we didn't turn out to be the perfection you expected. We didn't ask to be brought into the world.