"I write exactly as I speak, so therefore I would not say any writer influenced me at all."

"I don't say I was 'proceeding down a thoroughfare', I say I 'walked down the road'. I don't say I 'passed a hallowed …"

"It's like if you don't go to a dance you can never be rejected but you'll never get to dance either."

"(A) writer, a man I loved and he loved me and we got married and it was great and is still great. He believed I could…"

"Suddenly they asked me, as only the French would, ‘Madame, what is your philosophy of life?’ What a cosmic question, …"

"I once tried to write a novel about revenge. It's the only book I didn't finish. I couldn't get into the mind of the …"

"I often wonder that if I had met Hitler, I reckon I might have found some streak of decency in him."

"On my 100th birthday, piloting Gordon and myself into the side of a mountain."

"She had time for everybody. Perhaps because her stories came from all of us and for all of us."

"She rearranged a whole wall of books so it was completely full of Irish writers. She didn't look like she was any tro…"