If I actually ran the world, I’d do it from the kitchen. It’s not anything deliberate or a statement or anything, that’s just how I understand things. It’s arranged along informal lines.
I was then at the height of my two-facedness: that is, outside I seemed one way, inside I was another; outside false, inside true.
Gardening is really an extended form of reading, of history and philosophy. The garden itself has become like writing a book. I walk around and walk around. Apparently people often see me standing there and they wave to me and I don’t see them because I am reading the landscape.
Sometimes when someone says something stupid, my friends and I just read the reviews out loud and collapse with laughter at the stupidity of it all.
I had come to feel that my mother’s love for me was designed solely to make me into an echo of her; and I didn’t know why, but I felt that I would rather be dead than become just an echo of someone.
The shadow of my mother danced around the room to a tune that my own shadow sang.
I’ve never let the criticism deter me.
An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that, and it will never occur to you that the people who inhabit the place in which you have just paused cannot stand you.
I write out of defiance.
My writing has always been met with derision or dismissal.
Habit gives endurance, and fatigue is the best night cap.
I’m sometimes afraid I’ll cross a line and it’ll be difficult to come back, say, to dinner.
Of course, every time I end a book, I look down at myself and I’m just the same. I’m always disappointed that I’m just the same, but not enough to never do it again!
It is true that I am a writer, and I was married to a composer, and I have lived in a small village in New England, but my children are not named Heracles and Persephone, and my daughter doesn’t disappear underground every six months and emerge in the spring.
When I write a book, I hope to be beyond mortal by the time I’m finished.
I’m trying to earn a living in the way that is most enjoyable to me. I love the world of literature, and I hope to support myself in it.
I am not aware of anything below my neck. I live completely in my head.
I don’t really do anything that isn’t about writing, and I don’t really know who I am if I’m not thinking about writing.
Everything I do is because of writing. If I go for a walk, it’s because I’m thinking of writing. I go look at flowers, I go look at the garden, I go look at a museum, but it’s all coming back to writing.
When I start to write something, I suppose I want it to change me, to make me into something not myself.