One hires lawyers as on hires plumbers, because one wants to keep one’s hands off the beastly drains.

New York is not like London, a now-and-then place to many people. You can either not live in New York or not live anyplace else. One is either a lover or hater.

To continue what one had been doing – which was Dante’s idea of hell – is, I came to see, and the vision frightened me, easy in one’s sixties.

The journey is over. Love to all.

Odd, the years it took to learn one simple fact: that the prize just ahead, the next job, publication, love affair, marriage always seemed to hold the key to satisfaction but never, in the longer run, sufficed.

Upon becoming fifty the one thing you can’t afford is habit.

We women have lived too much with closure: “If he notices me, if I marry him, if I get into college, if I get this work accepted, if I get this job” – there always seems to loom the possibility of something being over, settled, sweeping clear the way for contentment. This is the delusion of a passive life. When the hope for closure is abandoned, when there is an end to fantasy, adventure for women will begin.

I don’t know why togetherness was ever held up as an ideal of marriage. Away from home for both, then together, that’s much better.

Life has this in common with prizefighting: if you’ve received a belly blow, it’s likely to be followed by a right to the jaw.

A literary academic can no more pass a bookstore than an alcoholic can pass a bar.