She says people ought to learn to live like them, with the body abandoned in a wilderness, and in the mind the memory of a single kiss, a single word, a single look to stand for a whole love.

Finding yourself in a hole, at the bottom of a hole, in almost total solitude, and discovering that only writing can save you. To be without the slightest subject for a book, the slightest idea for a book, is to find yourself, once again, before a book. A vast emptiness. A possible book. Before nothing. Before something like living, naked writing, like something terrible, terrible to overcome.

Men like women who write. Even though they don't say so. A writer is a foreign country.

She had lived her early years as though she were waiting for something she might, but never did, become.

In a thousand years time this day will have existed for a thousand years to the day. And the ignorance of the whole world about what they've said today will have a date too.

That she had so completely recovered her sanity was a source of sadness to her. One should never be cured of one's passion.

I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.