His sadness was of the kind that is patient and without hope.

Happiness is the light on the water. The water is cold and dark and deep.

Sometimes she goes out to work as a practical nurse, and comes home and sits by the kitchen table soaking her feet in a pan of hot water and Epsom salts. When she gets into bed and the springs creak under her weight, she groans with the pleasure of lying stretched out on an object that understands her so well.

It's deprivation that makes people writers, if they have it in them to be a writer.

What we refer to confidently as memory is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling.

The nail doesn't choose the time or the circumstances in which it is drawn to the magnet

If I had had to write only about imaginary people, I would have had to close up my typewriter. I wrote about my life in less and less disguise as I grew older, and finally with no disguise - except the disguise we create for ourselves, which is self-deception.