In the circle where I was raised, I knew of no one knowledgeable in the visual arts, no one who regularly attended musical performances, and only two adults other than my teachers who spoke without embarrassment of poetry and literature — both of these being women. As far as I can recall, I never heard a man refer to a good or a great book. I knew no one who had mastered, or even studied, another language from choice. And our articulate, conscious life proceeded without acknowledgement of the preceding civilisations which had produced it.

There is balance in life, but not fairness.

It's nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of.

I have a superstition that if I talk about plot, it's like letting sand out of a hole in the bottom of a bag.

Perhaps if we lived with less physical beauty we would develop our true natures more.

It is the impulse of our century, with its nearly religious belief in magnitude, to fling an institution into every void.

Nothing creates such untruth in you as the wish to please.