My New Year’s Eve Toast: to all the devils, lusts, passions, greeds, envies, loves, hates, strange desires, enemies ghostly and real, the army of memories, with which I do battle — may they never give me peace. (New Year's Eve, 1947)

Each book is, in a sense, an argument with myself, and I would write it, whether it is ever published or not.

I think J.D. Salinger is correct in granting no interviews, and in making no speeches

In view of the fact that I surround myself with numbskulls now, I shall die among numbskulls, and on my deathbed shall be surrounded by numbskulls who will not understand what I am saying ... Whom am I sleeping with these days ? Franz Kafka.

When I am thickening my plots, I like to think 'What if ... What if ... ' Thus my imagination can move from the likely, which everyone can think of, to the unlikely-but-possible, my preferred plot.

I prefer to live in the country where it's quiet. Woody Allen movies there are dubbed into Italian.

Perhaps it was freedom itself that choked her.