Holidays, if you enjoy them, have no history.

One should always act from one's inner sense of rhythm.

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.

How long, I wonder, will ignorance spell purity and knowledge shame?

anything that becomes a cult, or a mass movement, loses its moral and spiritual value. The crusade has to be personal, individual. As soon as it becomes collective it loses its purpose.

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.

The novel will never die, but it will keep changing and evolving and taking different shapes.