No matter how happy I had been in the past I do not long for it. The present is always the moment for which I love.

The inevitable is no less a shock just because it is inevitable.

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

I understood that I was inventing myself, and that I was doing this more in the way of a painter than in the way of a scientist. I could not count on precision or calculation; I could only count on intuition.

I would pretend when I was a child that I was Charlotte Brontë, because I'd read Jane Eyre when I was ten and, although I didn't understand it, I loved the idea that this woman had written a book. I wanted to be her.

When I start to write something, I suppose I want it to change me, to make me into something not myself.

I had been a girl of whom certain things were expected, none of them too bad: a career as a nurse, for example; a sense of duty to my parents; obedience to the law and worship of convention. But in one year of being away from home, that girl had gone out of existence.