Be bold, but not too bold. Have courage, but not too much.

If you wake up in the morning with a great sense of the things that have to be done in the day in order to get through to the next day, you lose the sense of the day as any kind of end in itself.

You will find that women who are pregnant often don't want to be and women who aren't desperately envy those who are. Labour wards are always full of very punitive people.

Words are not simple things: they take unto themselves, as they have through time, power and meaning.

Confidence is something one acquires. It can come early or late but it is impossible to write without it. Mine came late.

Youth gives a sense of new days dawning bright, going on for ever, and a kind of tamped-down excitement which keeps breaking through even the worst days of poverty, depression and loneliness. But then youth is something which only exists in retrospect; you are barely conscious of it while you have it.

Writing is an act of generosity toward other people.