“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

I always had the deepest affection for people who carried sublime tears in their silences.

Friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart.

I need silence, and to be alone and to go out, and to save one hour to consider what has happened to my world, what death has done to my world.

I like to have space to spread my mind out in.

She dares me to pour myself out like a living waterfall. She dares me to enter the soul that is more than my own; she extinguishes fear in mere seconds. She lets light come through.

The most extraordinary thing about writing is that when you’ve struck the right vein, tiredness goes. It must be an effort, thinking wrong.

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

I like people to be unhappy because I like them to have souls.

I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.

The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.

Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I’m never not thinking of you.

I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.

Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.

I don’t believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun.

Fiction is my addiction

Two hours of writing fiction leaves this writer completely drained. For those two hours he has been in a different place with totally different people.

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.

A writer of fiction lives in fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.

I only read biographies, metaphysics and psychology. I can dream up my own fiction.

You can have a very intense relationship with fictional characters because they are in your own head.

When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.

A man’s face is his autobiography. A woman’s face is her work of fiction.