A house that does not have one warm, comfy chair in it is soulless.

More than any other beauty (though it is true of all beauty except in art) passion seems to me to have the seeds of its own destruction in it.

The woman who needs to create works of art is born with a kind of psychic tension in her which drives her unmercifully to find a way to balance, to make herself whole. Every human being has this need: in the artist it is mandatory. Unable to fulfill it, he goes mad. But when the artist is a woman she fulfills it at the expense of herself as a woman.

I have never written a book that was not born out of a question I needed to answer for myself.

we are never done with thinking about our parents, I suppose, and come to know them better long after they are dead than we ever did when they were alive.

A good marriage shuts out a very great deal.

Wrinkles here and there seem unimportant compared to the Gestalt of the whole person I have become in this past year.