I'm waiting for the day when my children cease to find my domestic propriety reassuring and actually find it annoying.

What other grown-up gets told how to do their job so often as a writer?

If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse.

A neighbor is something that belongs to the stable world of home life, the thing that lives next door to you.

To become a mother is to learn a whole language - to relearn it, perhaps, as it was the tongue to which we were born - and hence gain entrance to a forgotten world of comprehension.

The true self seeks release, not constraint. It doesnt want to be corseted in a sonnet or made to learn a system of musical notations. It wants liberation, which is why very often it fastens on the novel, for the novel seems spacious, undefined, free.

As writers go, I have a skin of average thickness. I am pleased by a good review, disappointed by a bad. None of it penetrates far enough to influence the thing I write next.