I see no reason to keep silent about my enjoyment of the sound of my own voice as I work.

The true novelist is one who understands the work as a continuous poem, is a myth-maker, and the wonder of the art resides in the endless different ways of telling a story.

Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid.

She wasn't a person to whom things happen. She did all the happenings.

it never really occurred to her that literary men, if they like women at all, do not want literary women but girls.

It's a whydunnit in q-sharp major and it has a message: never talk to the sort of girls that you wouldn't leave lying about in your drawing-room for the servants to pick up.

I never trust the airlines from those countries where the pilots believe in the afterlife. You are safer when they don't.