The reason life is so strange is that so often people have no choice.

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.

Love, even of the most ardent and soul-destroying kind, is never caught by the lens of the camera.

A writer is a reader who is moved to emulation.

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.

Reading is rapture (or if it isn't, I put the book down meaning to go on with it later, and escape out the side door).

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