In terms of work, I never felt that I've done it right. I always want to have done it differently, to have done it better, a different way.

The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.

It Was Once Suggested to Me that, as an Antidote to Crying, I Put My Head in a Paper Bag.

Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.

Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.

I did consider marriage and motherhood extreme and doomed commitments. Not out of any experience of them as such, but it was simply the way I looked at things.