“I need words and print... I need print like an addict. I could live without it, perhaps. But I hope I never have to try.”

“What really annoys me are the ones who write to say, I am doing your book for my final examinations and could you please tell me what the meaning of it is. I find it just so staggering--that you're supposed to explain the meaning of your book to some total stranger! If I knew what the meanings of my books were, I wouldn't have bothered to write them.”

“Because if one has an image, however dim and romantic, of a journey's end, one may, in the end, surely reach it, after no matter how many detours and deceptions and abandonings of hope. And hope could never have been entirely abandoned, even in the worst days.”

“I actually remember feeling delight, at two o'clock in the morning, when the baby woke for his feed, because I so longed to have another look at him.”

“I'd rather be at the end of a dying tradition, which I admire, than at the beginning of a tradition which I deplore.”

“Before Octavia was born, I used to think that love bore some relation to merit and to beauty, but now I saw that this was not so.”

“I don't see how you can go too far, in the right direction”