For me, the dead remain dead. If I couldn't believe that, I don't think I could go on living.

[My father and his friends] believed in equality for women without troubling to acquire the basic domestic skills which would have made that equality possible.

We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life.

I am fifty years old and I have never known what it is to love. I can write those words, know them to be true, but feel only the regret that a tone-deaf man must feel because he can't appreicate music, a regret less keen because it is for something never known, not for something lost.

Publishers don't nurse you; they buy and sell you.

Love, always love. Perhaps that’s what we’re all looking for.

I still occasionally need to struggle but I now fear it less. The weapons I fight it with are also my consolations: books, music, food, wine, nature.