I don't think there's any intrinsic difference between a lover and a husband. ... If I were cynical, I would say that a woman should have both a good husband and a lover. But I'm not cynical so I'll just say that a woman should have a lover who's a good husband and a husband who's a good lover, perhaps both.

I recognize limitations in the sense that I've read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare . . . Aside from that I don't think of limiting myself.

Unhappiness has nothing to teach, and resignation is ugly.

Love lasts about seven years. That's how long it takes for the cells of the body to totally replace themselves.

He refused categorically all ideas of fidelity or serious commitments. He explained that they were arbitrary and sterile. From anyone else such views would have shocked me, but I knew that in his case they did not exclude tenderness and devotion - feelings which came all the more easily to him since he was determined that they should be transient.

It seems to me that there are two kinds of trickery: the "fronts" people assume before one another's eyes, and the "front" a writer puts on the face of reality.

I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live.