Without anxiety life would have very little savor.

For me the moral dilemma this past year has been how to make peace with the unacceptable.

Solitude is my element, and the reason is that extreme awareness of other people... precludes awareness of one's self so that after a while the self no longer knows that it exists.

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.

Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.

Death does frame a person and somehow it is the good that stays.

An old body when it is loved becomes a sacred treasure; and sex itself must always, it seems to me, come to us as a sacrament and be so used or it is meaningless. The flesh is suffused by the spirit, and it is forgetting this in the act of love-making that creates cynicism and despair.