“Climbing the economic ladder has been very hard for me; I still feel a great deal of guilt towards those I left behind.”

I didn’t choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence.

There was something unbearable in the things, in the people, in the buildings, in the streets that, only if you reinvented it all, as in a game, became acceptable.

It’s the people who love us or hate us – or both – who hold together the thousands of fragments we are made of.

A calendar, you have to calculate how much time has passed between you and the facts, the emotions to be narrated.

The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose

Women, in all fields – whether mothers or not – still encounter an extraordinary number of obstacles. They have to hold too many things together and often sacrifice their aspirations in the name of affections.

As a girl – twelve, thirteen years old – I was absolutely certain that a good book had to have a man as its hero, and that depressed me.

I no longer protect myself from the world I grew up in. Rather, today I try to protect the feelings I have for that world, the emotional space where my desire to write first took hold, and still grows.

Writing for me is a dragnet that carries everything away with it: expressions and figures of speech, postures, feelings, thoughts, troubles. In short, the lives of others.

The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick.

At most, I may write when I am disturbed by something. I have recently discovered the pleasure of finding written answers to written questions.

He was going through one of those moments that you read about in books, when a character reacts in an unexpectedly extreme way to the normal discontents of living.

Those who write need that “willing suspension of disbelief “, as Coleridge called it.

I have always paid careful attention to social and economic conflicts, to the dialectic – if we can call it that – between high and low. Maybe it’s because I was not born or brought up in affluence.

The fictional treatment of biographical material – a treatment that for me is essential – is full of traps.

Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell.

There is nothing more tragic than to come to the end of life and know we have been on the wrong course.

I have clearly recorded this: for one can learn good lessons also from what has been tried but clearly has not succeeded, when it is clear why it has not succeeded.

The quest of the truth had been born in me – the most tragic and incomplete, as well as the most essential, of man’s quests.

I’ve been asked whether I have a hobby, and have felt strangely offended that anyone would assume I have the time.

Many men ridicule the idea that it can be scientifically handled. They tell us the unemployed have always been with us, and always must be. It is the oldest reason in the world for tolerating injustice and misery.

The appeal to the white man’s pocket has ever been more effectual than all the appeals ever made to his conscience.

Sacredness of human life! The world has never believed it! It has been with life that we settled our quarrels, won wives, gold and land, defended ideas, imposed religions.

I’ve never not been famous.