Pride makes us long for a solution to things – a solution, a purpose, a final cause; but the better telescopes become, the more stars appear.

Women were brought up to believe that men were the answer. They weren't. They weren't even one of the questions.

I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded - and how pitiful that was.

WHORES. Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius.

When we're young, everyone over the age of thirty looks middle-aged, everyone over fifty antique. And time, as it goes by, confirms that we weren't that wrong. Those little age differentials, so crucial and so gross when we are young erode. We end up all belonging to the same category, that of the non-young. I've never much minded this myself.

You can't have a novel without real, believable people, and once you get into either too theoretical a novel or too philosophical a novel, you get into the dangers that the French novel has discovered in the past 50 or 60 years. And you get into a sort of aridity. No, you have to have real, identifiable people to whom the reader reacts in a way as if they were real people.

I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.