I think you often have that sense when you write--that if you can spot something in yourself and set it down on paper, you're free of it. And you're not, of course; you've just managed to set it down on paper, that's all.

When something like this happens, you suddenly have no sense of reality at all. You have lost a piece of your past. The infidelity itself is small potatoes compared to the low-level brain damage that results when a whole chunk of your life turns out to have been completely different from what you thought it was. It becomes impossible to look back at anything that's happened ... without wondering what was really going on.

The hardest thing about writing is writing.

When your children are teenagers, it's important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you.

It's always hard to remember love - years pass and you say to yourself, was I really in love or was I just kidding myself? Was I really in love or was I just pretending he was the man of my dreams? Was I really in love or was I just desperate?

Food became, for dinner parties in the sixties, what abstract expressionism had been in the fifties.

The image of the journalist as wallflower at the orgy has been replaced by the journalist as the life of the party.