If you do nothing unexpected, nothing unexpected happens.

by and large, nothing is as bad as you fear, or as good as you hope.

Writing is more than just the making of a series of comprehensible statements: it is the gathering in of connotations; the harvesting of them, like blackberries in a good season, ripe and heavy, snatched from among the thorns of logic.

Fiction stretches our sensibilities and our understanding, as mere information never can.

I like the dry-cleaners. I like the sense of refreshment and renewal. I like the way dirty old torn clothes are dumped, to be returned clean and wholesome in their slippery transparent cases. Better than confesssion any day. Here there is a true sense of rebirth, redemption, salvation.

There is probably an innate masochism in a lot of women that ends up disappointed if men don't ill-treat them.

There is no real escape from autobiography into biography. The self has to be faced, or we die.