A woman's body works as if it knew something she didn't, and does not have her best interests at heart. If you need to look your best it will deliver you a pimple; if you don't want it to, your period will start early; if you want a baby badly your body refuses to give you one; if you are content in your life, lo, you are pregnant.

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

Fiction, on the whole, and if it is any good, tends to be a subversive element in society.

If infinity is as they describe it, all things are not just possible but in the end certain.

No one seemed able to look at themselves, coolly, from the outside. Their reality was all that could be seen in the light cast ahead by their own wishful thinking.

The desire for self-expression afflicts people when they feel there is something of themselves which is not getting through to the outside world.

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