For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.
I don’t think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.
In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.
I’ve won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one. I’m delighted to win them all, the whole lot.
I’m very unhappy when I’m not writing.
When I became political and Communist, it was because they were the only people I had ever met who fought the color bar in their lives.
We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.
Things are not quite so simple always as black and white.
Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.
The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven’t changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don’t change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.
When a book’s pattern and the shape of its inner life is as plain to the reader as it is to the author – then perhaps it is time to throw the book aside, as having had its day, and start again on something new.
Women are slaves to their beauty.
We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.
We are all creatures of the stars and their forces, they make us, we make them, we are part of a dance from which we by no means and not ever may consider ourselves separate.
Every spendthrift passion has its attendant courtiers.
I lived in a brilliantly lit haze, shifting and flickering according to my changing desires. Of course, that is only a description of being young.
It is not always possible to know, when you make a note of an event, or a state of mind, how this may strike someone perhaps ten thousand years later.
Sleep is harder to reach and thinner, and sleeping is no longer the Drop into the black pit all oblivion until the alarm clock, no, sleep is thin and fitful and full of memories and reminders and the dark is never dark enough.
Some books are not read in the right way because they have skipped a stage of opinion, assume a crystallization of information in society which has not yet taken place.
Men are unwise and curiously planned.