Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.

Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.

The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.

Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.

When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.

There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.

The wish to lead out one's lover must be a tribal feeling; the wish to be seen as loved is part of one's self-respect.

Never to lie is to have no lock on your door, you are never wholly alone.

The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.

The best that an individual can do is to concentrate on what he or she can do, in the course of a burning effort to do it better.

Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.

No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.

The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet - when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round.

Nobody speaks the truth when there is something they must have.

That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.