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

what I love is slowness. Slow people, slow reading, slow traveling, slow eggs, and slow love. Everything good comes slow.

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.

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.

Leave the dishes unwashed and the demands on your time unanswered. Be ruthless and refuse to do what people ask of you.

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

Reading. Reading was the stable backdrop against which my life was played.