“Being solitary is being alone well: being alone luxuriously immersed in doings of your own choice, aware of the fullness of your won presence rather than of the absence of others. Because solitude is an achievement. ”

“I've arrived at this outermost edge of my life by my own actions. Where I am is thoroughly unacceptable. Therefore, I must stop doing what I've been doing.”

“But there is saying, and there is doing, and almost always people do something better than they can talk about it, as though the minded body defeats every attempt to select out only the mind part as deserving sole responsibility for the success.”

“Women would be better off when they no longer needed men more than they needed their own independent identities...How long a time it took me after my divorce to understand that being alone is not the same as being lonely.”

“I think there is no way to write about being alone. To write is to tell something to somebody to communicate to others. . . . Solitude is noncommunication, the absence of others, the presence of a self sufficient to itself.”

“A story is not like a road to follow … it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.”

“I'd rather face mythological creatures or prarnormal beings then to deal with my own demons. Nothing's scarier than being alone with your thoughts.Fuck the bump in the night BS, it's the silence that does it for me.”