The worst thing about jealousy is how low it makes you reach.
I don’t think that I had any idea that ‘Fear of Flying’ would become a part of the culture. I had no idea that it would go all over the world and be published in Chinese and Serbo-Croat and so on.
You are always naked when you start writing; you are always as if you had never written anything before; you are always a beginner. Shakespeare wrote without knowing he would become Shakespeare.
Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that: one friend in an indifferent world.
When I was a ten-year old bookworm and used to kiss the dust jacket pictures of authors as if they were icons, it used to amaze me that these remote people could provoke me to love.
Fear is a sign-usually a sign that I’m doing something right.
All natural disasters are comforting because they reaffirm our impotence, in which, otherwise, we might stop believing. At times it is strangely sedative to know the extent of your own powerlessness.
Often I find that poems predict what I’m going to do later in my own writing, and often I find that poems predict my life. So I think poetry is the most intense expression of feeling that we have.
Ken, my husband, just smelled like he belonged to me. I’m not talking about hygiene. I’m talking about when you hug him, he either feels like a member of your tribe or not. It’s their scent.
I write slowly by hand. Publishing is effectively bankrupt for you unless you are Danielle Steele. It takes a year to write book and advances are going down or disappearing.
Sadly, because of the enormous gap between rich and poor, some mothers can afford helpers, but many can’t. Those who can would be kinder to refrain from criticizing other women.
The stones themselves are thick with history, and those cats that dash through the alleyways must surely be the ghosts of the famous dead in feline disguise.
Allow me to put the record straight. I am forty-six and have been for some years past.
Any system was a straightjacket if you insisted on adhering to it so totally and humorlessly.
Women tend to be preservers of the social structure, of marriage. They don’t want to upset their husbands or their significant others. They don’t want to hurt people.
The most important education you get is your own – the one you learn in solitude.
Love is serene and calm.
Love gives without taking.
I know some good marriages-marriages where both people are just trying to get through their days by helping each other, being good to each other.
Betrayal betrays the betrayer.