in the very long run any success devours - and perhaps also corrupts.

My own feeling is that the only possible reason for engaging in the hard labor of writing a novel, is that one is bothered by something one needs to understand, and can come to understand only through the characters in the imagined situation.

When you change the way you look at a thing, the thing itself changes...By mastering feelings, she had come to understand the meaning of discipline and its reward: freedom and power.

I love giving flowers. It is so deliciously unlasting and romantic.

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

It takes a long time for words to become thought.

Poetry is a dangerous profession between conflict and resolution, between feeling and thought, between becoming and being, between the ultra-personal and the universal - and these balances are shifting all the time.