One can present people with opportunities. One cannot make them equal to them.

People have been saying the novel is dead for as far back as I can remember. The novel will never die, but it will keep changing and evolving and taking different shapes. Storytelling, which is the basis of the novel, has always existed and always will.

In a corner of the churchyard grew a plantation of white violets, enormously plump and prosperous-looking. ... I saw the dead stretched out under me in the earth, feeding these flowers with a thin milk drawn from their bones.

[On Ian Fleming:] The trouble with Ian is that he gets off with women because he can't get on with them.

Advice to Young Journal Keepers. Be lenient with yourself. Conceal your worst faults, leave out your most shameful thoughts, actions, and temptations. Give yourself all the good and interesting qualities you want and haven't got. If you should die young, what comfort would it be to your relatives to read the truth and have to say: It is not a pearl we have lost, but a swine?

A writer works from the material she has, but it comes from the unconscious. Everything is stored up and one never knows what comes up to the surface at a given moment. A period of gestation is certainly needed, what Wordsworth called ‘emotion recollected in tranquility.’ You cannot write about an experience when you are living it, suffering it. You are too busy surviving to look at it objectively. At least I can’t.

But poetry is not to be lived, except for the few to whom it is more important than self-preservation.