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.
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.
I like sex. I've had feedback but men will feed you back anything, won't they?
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.
The peculiar need to write is increased, it seems, rather than allayed with practice.
We shelter children for a time; we live side by side with men; and that is all. We owe them nothing, and are owed nothing. I think we owe our friends more, especially our female friends.
Ask any woman in an arranged marriage. Love is the least stressful way out.
memory is so selective; wishful thinking presses it into service all the time.
Food is the supremest of pleasures.
I know that I'm a real writer because sometimes I write a story just because I want to; not because someone's told me to.
I have never got on with the quietist movements: they lapse too easily into self-congratulations: I have found the oneness, you have not. I prefer to look outside myself if I possibly can, not inside. Meditation reminds me too forcibly of being made to lie on a mat at nursery school and take an hour's nap.
Poetry, I thought then, and still do, is a matter of space on the page interrupted by a few well-chosen words, to give them importance. Prose is a less grand affair which has to stretch to the edges of the page to be convincing.
I wonder if my shrink (sorry, psychiatrist) was a woman not a man I'd be in a better or worse state?
Widows tend either to fade away when husbands die, committing emotional suttee, or else find that a new life burgeons. Here in Christchurch, a lot of burgeoning goes on.
I am an ordinary person, but carried to extremes.
Take me! Well, not quite take me, love me now, take me eventually
If you wake up in the morning with a great sense of the things that have to be done in the day in order to get through to the next day, you lose the sense of the day as any kind of end in itself.
Of course you have to believe in destiny; that everything is sheer chance is an intolerable notion.
Writers are always a great nuisance to publishers. If they could do without them, they would.
A woman's body works as if it knew something she didn't, and does not have her best interests at heart. If you need to look your best it will deliver you a pimple; if you don't want it to, your period will start early; if you want a baby badly your body refuses to give you one; if you are content in your life, lo, you are pregnant.
Letters crossing in the post, unfamiliar tunes heard three times in one day, the way that blows of fate descend upon the same bowed shoulders, and the beams of good fortune glow perpetually upon the blessed. Fairy tales, as I said, are lived out daily. There is far more going on in the world than we ever imagine.
one learns best, and writes best, in a state of defiance.
Sound waves do not die out. They travel forever and forever. All our sentences are immortal. Our useless bleatings circle the universe for all eternity.
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