She must find a boat and sail in it. No guarantee of shore. Only a conviction that what she wanted could exist, if she dared to find it.

For fate may hang on any moment and at any moment be changed.

Creative work is incredibly difficult, and that is where the tests lie. Ordinary professionalism and twenty years' experience can accomplish a lot, but it can't access the hidden places. That still needs what it always needs - a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything.

By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, then being on somebody else's.

I don't see myself as some kind of lone figure standing out there and doing my work in solitary splendour, but as part of the human condition and part of the continuum of writers.

There are so many separate selves; no one who writes creatively hasn't felt that.

What can i tell you about the choices we make? Fate reads like the polar opposite of decision, and so much of life reads like fate.