That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.

Everything is very quiet, the streets are never crowded, and the people one dislikes are out of town.

In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.

I know that I have in my make-up layers of synthetic experiences, and that the most powerful of my memories are only half true.

... in nine out of ten cases the original wish to write is the wish to make oneself felt[ellipsis in source] the non-essential writer never gets past that wish.

Often when I write I am trying to make words do the work of line and color. I have the painter's sensitivity to light. Much of my writing is verbal painting.

Disappointment tears the bearable film off life.