“To apologize for what you most wanted to do, to concede that it was obnoxious, boring, ‘vulgar and unsafe’ — that was the worst thing.”

It made me perfectly happy with my own company and perhaps was good conditioning for the protracted solitude of writing books as slowly as I do.

I was rather a goody-goody as a child… It was only later on I discovered that you could be naughty and get away with it.

she kept sliding down, in small half-willing surrenders, till she was a heap, with the book held tiringly above her face.

There was the noise itself, which he thought of vaguely as the noise of classical music, sameish and rhetorical, full of feelings people surely never had

Now that I had actually made love, more astonishingly now that I had been made love to, the fantasies were subtly undermined.

What the problem was was this colossal redundancy.

The squandering of brilliant technique on cheap material.

I think being an only child created in me a degree of self-reliance, which I’m glad of.

I like things to reverberate, to be suggestive.

The great wisdom for writers, perhaps for everybody, is to come to understand to be at one with their own tempo.

The worse they are the more they see beauty in each other.

He wanted pure compliments, just as he wanted unconditional love.

…all his longings came out as a kind of disdain for what he longed for.

Just get out your magic pencil and erase the cloudy skies, and just draw a picture of me saying, I apologize.

Sometimes I had the feeling that she hurt herself when she turned cold and rigid. As if what she was yearning for was the warmth of my apologies, protestations, and entreaties. Sometimes I thought she just bullied me. But either way, I had no choice.

Now this is over thirty years later and the guy said he was that cab driver. He apologized and he was serious. I felt awful. He might have been spending his whole life thinking he had jinxed me, but I told him he hadn’t. My number was up.

Friends are God’s way of apologizing to us for our families

Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for the truth.

The liberal psyche wants to protect minorities, to apologize for imperialism, colonialism, slavery, and the appalling treatment of black people during the civil rights movement. At the same time, they want to continue to defend the rights of individuals.

Somedays I am more wolf than woman. And I am still learning how to stop apologizing for my wild.

Never apologize for your art.