How furious she must be, now that she's been taken at her word.

This is the middle of my life, I think of it as a place, like the middle of a river, the middle of a bridge, halfway across, halfway over. I'm supposed to have accumulated things by now: possessions, responsibilities, achievements, experience and wisdom. I'm supposed to be a person of substance.

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.

But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.

No male writer is likely to be asked to sit on a panel addressing itself to the special problems of a male writer.

My family was scientifically inclined: My brother did turn into a neurophysiologist, and I almost became a scientist myself. I could have gone that way.

People cry at weddings for the same reason they cry at happy endings: because they so desperately want to believe in something they know is not credible.