One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel – the quality of philosophy.
What is terrible is that after every one of the phases of my life is finished, I am left with no more than some banal commonplace that everyone knows.
Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.
And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous. No one notices you. You achieve a wonderful freedom. It is a positive thing. You can move about, unnoticed and invisible.
I treasure solitude. One doesn’t have to have human contact.
I am so happy to be communicating with people on this newest of new wavelengths which to some older people must seem like a kind of magic.
The older I get the more secrets I have, never to be revealed and this, I know, is a common condition of people my age. and why all this emphasis on kissing and telling? Kisses are the least of it.
I’m always astounded at the way we automatically look at what divides and separates us. We never look at what people have in common.
I don’t think San Francisco needs defending. I never meet anyone who doesn’t love the place, Americans or others.
What of October, that ambiguous month, the month of tension, the unendurable month?
For women like me, integrity isn’t chastity, it isn’t fidelity, it isn’t any of the old words. Integrity is the orgasm. That is something I haven’t any control over.
This is a catastrophic universe, always; and subject to hidden reversals, upheavals, changes, cataclysms, with joy never anything but the song of substance under pressure forced into new forms and shapes.
Basic facts tend always to be those most easily overlooked.
The cleverest trick of the Devil is that nobody believes in him. It. Her. Well, we have been very stupid.
People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.
Cats mean kittens, plentiful and frequent.
We, as a society, can’t tolerate very much difference.
Intelligence forbids tears.
I’m going to make the obvious point that maybe the word neurotic means the condition of being highly conscious and developed. The essence of neurosis is conflict. But the essence of living now, fully, not blocking off to what goes on, is conflict. In fact I’ve reached the stage where I look at people and say – he or she, they are whole at all because they’ve chosen to block off at this stage or that. People stay sane by blocking off, by limiting themselves.
If she had been left alone she would have gone on, in her own way, enjoying herself thoroughly, until people found one day that she had turned imperceptibly into one of those women who have become old without ever having been middle aged: a little withered, a little acid, hard as nails, sentimentally kindhearted, and addicted to religion or small dogs.