[When working on a book] I have an almost complete detachment from the world I live in, a sort of armor against distraction. I talk to people, move about, appear on the surface much as usual. But later on I have only a confused memory of what has happened during that period.

The fetish of the great university, of expensive colleges for young women, is too often simply a fetish. It is not based on a genuine desire for learning. Education today need not be sought at any great distance. It is largely compounded of two things, of a certain snobbishness on the part of parents, and of escape from home on the part of youth. And to those who must earn quickly it is often sheer waste of time. Very few colleges prepare their students for any special work.

I have always regarded divorce as essentially disagreeable, like castor oil, but necessary.

I began to feel that if religion was either an illusion or a revelation, it was simpler to accept it as an illusion.

Every writer knows the terror of an unexpected success. How to carry on? How to repeat it?

The author lives with one foot in an everyday world and the other feeling about anxiously for a foothold in another more precarious one.

Suspicion is like the rain. It falls on the just and on the unjust.