I think being a woman is like being Irish. Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same.

How rarely can happiness be really innocent and not triumphant, not an insult to the deprived.

One doesn't have to get anywhere in a marriage. It's not a public conveyance.

Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing.

Eating reveals the characteristic grossness of the human race and also the in-built failure of its satisfactions. We arrive eager, we stuff ourselves and we go away depressed and disappointed and probably feeling a bit queasy into the bargain. It's an image of the déçu in human existence. A greedy start and a stupefied finish. Waiters, who are constantly observing this cycle, must be the most disillusioned of men.

emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. in the middle they are acted. this is why all the world is a stage.

All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn.