You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.

I'm not senile," I snapped. "If I burn the house down it will be on purpose.

I was unfair to him, of course, but where would I have been without unfairness? In thrall, in harness. Young women need unfairness, it's one of their few defenses. They need their callousness, they need their ignorance. They walk in the dark, along the edges of high cliffs, humming to themselves, thinking themselves invulnerable.

This afternoon held that special quality of mournful emptiness I've connected with late Sunday afternoons ever since childhood: the feeling of having nothing to do.

If you feel that there's the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can't, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you'd be a very strange person indeed.

Laughter may instruct but it may also conceal, defending the joker against anger and retaliation: a game is only a game.

Science never makes things that do not have to do with what we feel, by which I mean what we want and what we fear.