The danger of motherhood. you relive your early self, through the eyes of your mother.

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.

The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.

You don't have to understand why anything that has happened nor do you even have to understand what it is that has happened. You have only to live with the remains.

while there are 'women writers' there are not, and have never been, 'men writers.' This is an empty category, a class without specimens; for the noun 'writer' - the very verb 'writing' - always implies masculinity.

You can't deny Eros. Eros wills trike, like lightning. Our human defenses are frail, ludicrous. Like plasterboard houses in a hurricane. Your triumph is in perfect submission. And the god of Eros will flow through you, as Lawrence says, in the 'perfect obliteration of blood consciousness.

Before you can write a novel you have to have a number of ideas that come together. One idea is not enough.