I never had, or wished for, power over you. That isn't true, of course. I wanted the greatest power of all. but not advantage, or authority.

Children seldom have a proper sense of their own tragedy, discounting and keeping hidden the true horrors of their short lives, humbly imagining real calamity to be some prestigious drama of the grown-up world.

In England, life is a long process of composing oneself.

When you realize someone is trying to hurt you, it hurts less." "Unless you love them.

When people say of their tragedies, 'I don't often think of it now,' what they mean is it has entered permanently into their thoughts, and colors everything.

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.

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.