For that's what a woman, a mother wants - to teach her children to take an interest in life. She knows it's safer for them to be interested in other people's happiness than to believe in their own.

A house means a family house, a place specially meant for putting children and men in so as to restrict their waywardness and distract them from the longing for adventure and escape they've had since time began.

We’re in the vanguard of a nameless battle, a battle without arms or bloodshed or glory: we’re in the vanguard of waiting.

For that's what a woman, a mother wants - to teach her children to take an interest in life. She knows it's safer for them to be interested in other people's happiness than to believe in their own.

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.

a writer is a foreign country

To love one child and to love all children, whether living or dead -somewhere these two loves come together. To love a no-good but humble punk and to love an honest man who believes himself to be an honest man -somewhere these, too, come together.