Chemistry. . . is like the maid occupied with daily civilisation; she is busy with fertilisers, medicines, glass, insecticides. . . for she dispenses the recipes.
It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed.
I don't think writers choose the genre, the genre chooses us. I wrote out of the wish to create order out of disorder, the liking of a pattern.
to look back on one's life is to experience the capriciousness of memory. . . . the past is not static. It can be relived only in memory, and memory is a device for forgetting as well as remembering. It, too, is not immutable. It rediscovers, reinvents, reorganizes. Like a passage of prose it can be revised and repunctuated. To that extent, every autobiography is a work of fiction and every work of fiction an autobiography.
It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.
Write what you need to write, not what is currently popular or what you think will sell.
I knew the facts of death before I knew the facts of life. There never was a time when I didn't see the skull beneath the skin.
I don't wear particular designers. I wear whoever fits me well.
Money may not buy happiness, but it can damn well give it!
I wore a woman's antique fur jacket to my high school junior prom.
But I think she would have been happy with Fabrice,' I said. 'He was the great love of her life, you know. ' Oh, dulling,' said my mother, sadly. 'One always thinks that. Every, every time.