A novel is really like a symphony where instrument after instrument has to come in at its own time, and no other.

I get so tired of moral bookkeeping.

Childhood is the fiery furnace in which we are melted down to essentials and that essential shaped for good.

In this moment she felt that she had been robbed of an enormous number of valuable things, whether material or intangible: things lost or broken by her own fault, things she had forgotten and left in houses when she moved: books borrowed from her and not returned, journeys she had planned and had not made, words she had waited to hear spoken to her and had not heard, and the words she meant to answer with. . . .

we know that the Furies do not come uninvited.

They had both noticed that a life of dissipation sometimes gave to a face the look of gaunt suffering spirituality that a life of asceticism was supposed to give and quite often did not.

I always write a story in one sitting.