There are days when solitude, for someone my age, is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.

beautiful December grapes, blue as plums, every grape a little skinful of sweet, tasteless water

A woman who thinks she is intelligent demands the same rights as man. An intelligent woman gives up.

I am indebted to the cat for a particular kind of honorable deceit, for a greater control over myself, for a characteristic aversion to brutal sounds, and for the need to keep silent for long periods of time.

By an image we hold on to our lost treasures, but it is the wrenching loss that forms the image, composes, binds the bouquet.

To write is to pour one’s innermost self passionately upon the tempting paper, at such frantic speed that sometimes one’s hand struggles and rebels, overdriven by the impatient god which guides it - and to find, next day, in place of the golden bough that bloomed miraculously in that dazzling hour, a withered bramble and a stunted flower.

If we want to be sincere, we must admit that there is a well-nourished love and an ill-nourished love. And the rest is literature.