People might be surprised to know how much I throw away. For every page I publish, I throw 10 pages away.

I have beliefs, of course, like everyone-but I don't always believe in them.

The only people who claim that money is not important are people who have enough money so that they are relieved of the ugly burden of thinking about it.

The relationship between parents and children, but especially between mothers and daughters, is tremendously powerful, scarcely to be comprehended in any rational way.

My own way of writing is very meditated and, despite my reputation, rather slow-moving. So I do spend a good deal of time contemplating endings. The final ending is usually arrived at simply by intuition.

...failure is a human condition, not victory over odds; for each Hellen Keller who triumphs, there are tens of millions who fail, mute and deaf and insensate as vegetables tossed upon a vast garbage pile to rot.

Each time I undertake to reread Virginia Woolf, I am somewhat baffled by the signature breathlessness and relentlessly "poetic" tone, the shimmering impressionism, so very different from the vivid, precise, magisterial (and often very funny) prose of her contemporary James Joyce.