For this was the round of love: fear which leads on desire, tenderness and fury, and that brutal anguish which triumphantly follows pleasure.

A dress makes no sense unless it inspires men to take it off of you.

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.

No one is more conventional than a woman who is falling out of love.

There are moments when you feel trapped, ill at ease. A year later the same feeling can turn out to be the theme of a book.

The one thing I regret is that I will never have time to read all the books I want to read.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.