Love is the terrible secret people are suspected of unless they're married, then one always suspects they don't.

I've never been resigned to ready-made ideas as I was to ready-made clothes, perhaps because although I couldn't sew, I could think.

I had always said to myself that forty was the cut off point of my apprenticeship which may for some people sound like a very long one, but the novel as art is a middle-aged art.

I was very frightened when I turned forty. I suddenly thought I ought to wake up and be speaking with the voice of God.

Human beings tolerate what they understand they have to tolerate.

Conventions, like clichés, have a way of surviving their own usefulness.

Every artist seems to me to have the job of bearing witness to the world we live in. To some extent I think of all of us as artists, because we have voices and we are each of us unique.