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

Hope is one of those no-win-no-fee things, and although it needs some encouragement to survive, its existence doesn't necessarily prove anything.

How can there be so many mothers in the world but so little sense of what it might be to become one?

Human beings have a need, generally, to destroy things. The Freudian principle of civilisation is correct. There's always, always a difference between the family image and the reality.

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.

Even if they knew the truth of their own feelings, most mothers would be socially and emotionally incapable of revealing it.

Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative.