A writer is a reader who is moved to emulation..

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 g….

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

I had inadvertently walked through a door that I shouldn’t have gone through and couldn’t get back to the place I hadn’t meant to leave..

I am the cat that walks alone..

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 sa….

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

Your reader is at least as bright as you are.

The view after seventy is breathtaking. What is lacking is someone, anyone, of the older generation to whom you can turn when you want to satisfy you….

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)..

If you turn the imagination loose like a hunting dog, it will often return with the bird in its mouth..

My younger daughter told me recently that when she was a child she thought the typewriter was a toy that I went into my room and closed the door and ….

What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory--meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby r….

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

Who knows what oversensitive is, considering all there is to be sensitive to..

Because I actively enjoy sleeping, dreams, the unexplainable dialogues that take place in my head as I am drifting off, all that, I tell myself that ….

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

A gentleman doesn't have one set of manners for the house of a poor man and another for the house of someone with an income incomparable to his own..

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

My father represented authority, which meant—to me—that he could not also represent understanding..

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