Good girls like myself need subversion. Being solemn, I aspire to comedy. Being a novelist, I aspire to the musical. Being organized, I aspire to luminous chaos. Loving the power of grammar and the fine distinctions of language, I seek the part of the mind I didn't know was there, the part 'sheer,' 'no-manfathomed,' 'cliffs of fall.

The human desire to know why is as powerful as the desire to know what happened next, and it is a desire of a higher order.

If character is the foreground of fiction, setting is the background, and as in a painting's composition, the foreground may be in harmony or in conflict with the background.

Part of the trouble is that I've never properly understood that some disasters accumulate, that they don't all land like a child out of an apple tree.

The only justification for writing a novel is that it should be wonderful. Adequate is inadequate.

In Literature, only trouble is interesting.

Most writing is done between the mind and the hand, not between the hand and the page.