“People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.”

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”

“Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.”

“The wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive.”

“All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.”

“Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.”

“Books are the mirrors of the soul.”

“Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.”

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

“When I'm writing, I am trying to find out who I am, who we are, what we're capable of, how we feel, how we lose and stand up, and go on from darkness into darkness.”

“You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.”

“You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”