Writing is an act of generosity toward other people.
Youth gives a sense of new days dawning bright, going on for ever, and a kind of tamped-down excitement which keeps breaking through even the worst days of poverty, depression and loneliness. But then youth is something which only exists in retrospect; you are barely conscious of it while you have it.
I am not cynical. I am just old. I know what is going to happen next.
One can learn, at least. One can go on learning until the day one is cut off.
I learned that sex was not a question of victory or defeat, of pleasure or profit: of a hand's manipulation and a physical response: I learned that in its purest pleasure it belongs to neither of those who practise it, in the same way as a child belongs to neither parent: it is a free spirit: it simply exists.
Marriage is what happens when one at least of the partners doesn't want the other to get away.
If infinity is as they describe it, all things are not just possible but in the end certain.
Confidence is something one acquires. It can come early or late but it is impossible to write without it. Mine came late.
Fiction, on the whole, and if it is any good, tends to be a subversive element in society.
To the happy all things come: happiness can even bring the dead back to life. It is our resentments, our dreariness, our hate and envy, unrecognized by us, which keeps us miserable. Yet these things are in our heads, not out of our hands; we own them. We can throw them out if we choose.
Prudence says one thing, desire says another, and I'd rather go with desire any time.
one tends to suspect others of what one is guilty of oneself. The unfaithful wife is quick to suspect the husband of infidelity.
There is probably an innate masochism in a lot of women that ends up disappointed if men don't ill-treat them.
Ambition will, and should, always outstrip achievement.
She could see that to lose a sibling was hard: it could only seem unnatural:out of time, out of order, a vicious re-run of your own departure into nothingness.
Instinct' usually just means our conditioning to believe this or believe that, without thinking to investigate.
The desire for self-expression afflicts people when they feel there is something of themselves which is not getting through to the outside world.
I was always furious because you couldn't take out more than three books in one day. You would go home with your three books and read them and it would still be only five o'clock. The library didn't shut till half past, but you couldn't change the books till the next day.
Because one cause is bad does not make the opposing cause good.
Be bold, but not too bold. Have courage, but not too much.
There is no real escape from autobiography into biography. The self has to be faced, or we die.
The peculiar need to write is increased, it seems, rather than allayed with practice.
Writing is more than just the making of a series of comprehensible statements: it is the gathering in of connotations; the harvesting of them, like blackberries in a good season, ripe and heavy, snatched from among the thorns of logic.
I like sex. I've had feedback but men will feed you back anything, won't they?
Novelists... fashioning nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly through the chaos of his own existence.
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