My children are living, thinking human beings. It isn't in my power to regret them, for they belong to themselves.

Childhood, after all, is not an ending, but rather a state full of potent curiosity.

I don't really believe in stories, only in the people who tell them.

A sentence is born into this world neither good nor bad, and that to establish its character is a question of the subtlest possible adjustments, a process of intuition to which exaggeration and force are fatal.

Honest criticism, I suppose, has its place. But honest writing is infinitely more valuable.

I felt that I could swim for miles, out into the ocean: a desire for freedom, an impulse to move, tugged at me as though it were a thread fastened to my chest. It was an impulse I knew well, and I had learned that it was not the summons from a larger world I used to believe it to be. It was simply a desire to escape from what I had.

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.