The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people.

The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.

What madness! Yet she would do it, if she could force herself. She'd become, she believed, a stronger person: a willful, resolute. Like the man who adored her, reckless.

For madness must be punished in a world in which mere sanity is prized. The revenge of the ordinary upon the gifted.

Ideas brush past fleeting and insubstantial as moths. But I let them go, I don't want them. What I want is a voice.

The domestic lives we live - which may be accidental, or not entirely of our making - help to make possible our writing lives; our imaginations are freed, or stimulated, by the very prospect of companionship, quiet, a predictable and consoling routine.

Most people who are writers go through periods when they can't write.