As it has turned out, the whole relationship between men, women and children has tilted, to the disadvantage of women.

Novelists... fashioning nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly through the chaos of his own existence.

I am not cynical. I am just old. I know what is going to happen next.

Man seems not so much wicked as frail, unable to face pain, trouble and growing old. A good woman knows that nature is her enemy. Look at what it does to her.

I learned that sex was not a question of victory or defeat, of pleasure or profit: of a hand's manipulation and a physical response: I learned that in its purest pleasure it belongs to neither of those who practise it, in the same way as a child belongs to neither parent: it is a free spirit: it simply exists.

The peculiar need to write is increased, it seems, rather than allayed with practice.

For that is what a child should be, and seldom is, the product of man and woman, of opposing natures, unified, however temporarily, by the amazing, circling, weaving dance of love and lust and God's involvement in it.