A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.

Forgiving men is so much easier than forgiving women.

I know that some books and some writers, you can pretty much draw a square around it and say, 'Nobody under 40,' or 'Nobody under 25.' With my books, it always has been, and continues to be, spread right across the board, and I think the operative term is 'reader.'

Inside the peach, there is a stone.

The one good thing to be said about announcing yourself as a writer in the colonial Canadian fifties is that nobody told me I couldn't do it because I was a girl. They simply found the entire proposition ridiculous. Writers were dead and English, or else extremely elderly and American; they were not sixteen years old and Canadian.

You can forget who you are if you're alone too much.

The sands of time are quicksands ... so much can sink into them without a trace.