A professional writer is a joke. You write because you can't do anything else, and then you have another job.

Writing is not a profession. It's a calling. It's almost holy.

when people say you're charming you are in deep trouble.

Gardening is really an extended form of reading, of history and philosophy. The garden itself has become like writing a book. I walk around and walk around. Apparently people often see me standing there and they wave to me and I don't see them because I am reading the landscape.

None of us seem to think that we should draw a line under what would be a satisfactory amount of wealth.

One of the things reading does, it makes your loneliness manageable if you are an essentially lonely person.

One day I was living silently in a personal hell, without anyone to tell what I felt, without even knowing that the feelings I had were possible to have; and then one day I was not living like that at all. I had begun to see the past like this: there is a line; you can draw it yourself, or sometimes it gets drawn for you; either way, there it is, your past, a collection of people you used to be and things you used to do. Your past is the person you no longer are, the situations you are no longer in.