When I write stories I am like someone who is in her own country, walking along streets that she has known since she was a child, between walls and trees that are hers.

My tidiness, and my untidiness, are full of regret and remorse and complex feelings.

Over my real sorrows I never weep.

My vocation is to write and I have known this for a long time. I hope I won't be misunderstood; I know nothing about the value of the things I am able to write. I know that writing is my vocation. When I sit down to write I feel extraordinarily at ease, and I move in an element which, it seems to me, I know extraordinarily well; I use tools that are familiar to me and they fit snugly in my hands. But when I write stories I am like someone who is in her own country, walking along streets that she has known since she was a child, between walls and trees that are hers.

As far as the education of children is concerned I think they should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones. Not thrift but generosity and an indifference to money; not caution but courage and a contempt for danger; not shrewdness but frankness and a love of truth; not tact but love for one's neighbor and self-denial; not a desire for success but a desire to be and to know.

And we are a people without tears. The things that moved our parents do not move us at all.

I think of a writer as a river: you reflect what passes before you.