For any writer who wants to keep a journal, be alive to everything, not just to what you're feeling, but also to your pets, to flowers, to what you're reading.

The tragic thing about learning from experience is I fear that one can only learn from one's own experience. Other people's - other nations' - experiences simply do not help. They can be imaginatively learned from. But people do not act on other people's experiences.

The body is a universe in itself and must be held as sacred as anything in creation....It is dangerous to forget the body as sacramental.

Is it perhaps the one necessity of love, that it be needed? And the one great human tragedy that it so rarely is?

We only keep what we lose.

when I am working I immediately feel hopeful.

There were moments ... when it seemed that all one could be asked was just to keep the ashtrays clean, the bed made, the wastebaskets emptied, as if one never got to the real things because of the constant exhausting battle to keep ordinary life from falling apart.