I suppose our capacity for self-delusion is boundless.

I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.

You know most people live ninety per cent in the past, seven per cent in the present, and that only leaves them three per cent for the future.

Misfortune is a fact of nature acceptable to women, especially when it falls on other women.

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.

People need responsibility. They resist assuming it, but they cannot get along without it.

I suffer as always from the fear of putting down the first line. It is amazing the terrors, the magics, the prayers, the straightening shyness that assails one.