Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All that matters is what you leave on the page.

...They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.

The belief that consciousness extends beyond death is surely to put more belief in the permanence of self, not less. That seems to me a comfort that you're allowing yourself.

Rarely does one see a squirrel tremble.

This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience-these are the marks of living.

'A reality shaped around your own desires' - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.

I'm very attracted to exile literature - particularly Nabokov - exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious length of time is so inconceivable to me.