The solitude of writing is a solitude without which writing could not be produced, or would crumble, drained bloodless by the search for something else to write.

When the past is recaptured by the imagination, breath is put back into life.

I know it's not clothes that make women beautiful or otherwise, nor beauty care, nor expensive creams, nor the distinction of costliness of their finery. I know the problem lies elsewhere. I don't know where. I only know it isn't where women think.

Alcohol doesn't console, it doesn't fill up anyone's psychological gaps, all it replaces is the lack of God.

a writer is a foreign country

A woman's work, from the time she gets up to the time she goes to bed, is as hard as a day at war, worse than a man's working day. ... To men, women's work was like the rain-bringing clouds, or the rain itself. The task involved was carried out every day as regularly as sleep. So men were happy - men in the Middle Ages, men at the time of the Revolution, and men in 1986: everything in the garden was lovely.

There are many women who write as they think they should write - to imitate men and make a place for themselves in literature.