I know that I'm a real writer because sometimes I write a story just because I want to; not because someone's told me to.

So much for the fruits of love. Love? What's love? Sex, ah, that's another thing. Love has babies: sex has abortions.

Style is what's there when you look at someone's writing and you know that they wrote it and nobody else did.

People hear what they want and expect to hear, not what is said.

Yet this perhaps is what love does, or the memory of it; it sucks the life from the living, glorying body and leaves it, when love has gone, a shred, a simulacrum - dross, to be swept up from the factory floor, pitiful and dusty, useless... Do all men and women feel love before they die? This force, this source of light, that lies before the sun; glances off mountains and lakes, blinding and dazzling, on a Sunday afternoon; so brilliant you have to guard your soul, fold your arms to shield your heart from the very memory of it.

Of course you have to believe in destiny; that everything is sheer chance is an intolerable notion.

Truly Alice, books are wonderful things; to sit alone in a room and laugh and cry, because you are reading, and still be safe when you close the book; and having finished it, discover you are changed, yet unchanged! To be able to visit the City of Invention at will, depart at will – that is all, really, education is about, should be about.