The challenge of modern freedom, or the combination of isolation and freedom which confronts you, is to make yourself up. The danger is that you may emerge from the process as a not-entirely-human creature. (Referenced in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People by Toby Young)

One must bear in mind the odd angle or slant that the rays of love have to take in order to reach a heart like mine.

With a novelist, like a surgeon, you have to get a feeling that you've fallen into good hands - someone from whom you can accept the anesthetic with confidence.

The two real problems in life are boredom and death.

The writer cannot make the seas of distraction stand still, but he [or she] can at times come between the madly distracted and the distractions.

It would not be practical for her to hate herself. Luckily, God sends a substitute, a husband.

Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death.