If you run away from trouble, it always follows.' Rather my impression, too. Though that never stopped me trying.

Writing is writing, and stories are stories. Perhaps the only true genres are fiction and nonfiction. And even there, who can be sure?

No one more cynical than an idealist.

I like writing about women, weak and strong, pathetic and heroic. I like writing about men, ditto. And all the variants of men and women, beasts and demons.

What is any of this to us? Time is endless and ours. Love and Death are only the games we play in it.

At an early school, when I was about 5, they asked what we wanted to be when we grew up. Everyone said silly things, and I said I wanted to be an actress. So that was what I wanted to be, but what I was, of course, was a writer.

The humble were the elect of God. Did not the priests teach so, in their gemmed, kingly robes, from their towering pulpits?