All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. And then there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don't matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake.

A room? A nice room? A beautiful room? A beautiful room with bath? Swing high, swing low, swing to and fro...This happened and that happened... And then the days came and I was alone.

I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn't have any.

I found when I was a child that if I put the hurt into words, it would go.

And I saw that all my life I had known that this was going to happen, and that I'd been afraid for a long time, I'd been afraid for a long time. There's fear, of course, with everybody. But now it had grown, it had grown gigantic; it filled me and it filled the whole world.

The woman had a humble, cringing manner. Of course, she had discovered that, having neither money nor virtue, she had better be humble if she knew what was good for her.

...morbidly, attracted him to strangeness, to recklessnesss, even unhappiness.