The sight of one's own heart is degrading; people are not meant to look inward - that's why they've been given bodies, to hide their souls.

February, when the days of winter seem endless and no amount of wistful recollecting can bring back any air of summer.

I am like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster, she thought, and the monster feels my tiny little movements inside.

The first book is the book you have to write to get back at your parents; the book you always had in you. Once you get that out of your way, you can start writing books.

Life Among the Savages is a disrespectful memoir of my children.

Now, I have nothing against the public school system as it is presently organized, once you allow the humor of its basic assumption about how it is possible to teach things to children.

I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at your desk and pick up your pen and finish writing when you put down your pen again; a writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing. Just as I believe that a painter cannot sit down to his morning coffee without noticing what color it is, so a writer cannot see an odd little gesture without putting a verbal description to it, and ought never to let a moment go by undescribed.