That's the hardest thing to do-to stay with a sentence until it has said what it should say, and then to know when that has been accomplished.

I may cause someone to feel badly, not because I'm doing something to them, but because the way in which I see might cause pain. But I am not doing the hurting.

What Independence Has Come to Mean to Me: The Pain of Solitude. The Pleasure of Self-Knowledge

You can't reduce an actual human being; you're just writing! You're not doing anything to another person.

They may recognize themselves in what you're writing, and then they have to say, "Well, she doesn't see me as I see myself." All a writer has is her own experience, and that experience comes out of human relationships.

When the whole world is writing letters, it's easy to lap into the quiet within, tell the story of an hour, keep alive the narrating inner life. To be alone in the presence of one's thought is not a value, only a common practice.

The older I grow, the more I realize how unfit we are for relationships. We are all such antagonists. It's part of the human condition to be deeply unfaithful to constancy. I do believe that.