I have done what people do, my life makes a reasonable showing. Can I go back to my books now?

What a feat of transmission: the emotive powers of the book, with no local habitation, pass safely from writer to reader, unmangled by printing and binding and shipping, renewed and available whenever we open it.

How are we to spend our lives, anyway? That is the real question. We read to seek the answer, and the search itself--the task of a lifetime--becomes the answer.

I have done what people do, my life makes a reasonable showing. Can I go back to my books now?

Once I got started, I wanted the life of a writer so fiercely that nothing could stop me. I wanted the intensity, the sense of aliveness that came from writing fiction. I'm still that way. My life is worth living when I've completed a good paragraph.

Nothing is as horrendous as imagining the times of happiness from an environment which is that of hell.

Getting away from being 'a good girl' is important because it's impossible to be a 'good girl' and a writer at the same time.