I am an inveterate homemaker, it is at once my pleasure, my recreation, and my handicap. Were I a man, my books would have been written in leisure, protected by a wife and a secretary and various household officials. As it is, being a woman, my work has had to be done between bouts of homemaking.

There is something to be said for losing one's possessions, after nothing can be done about it. I had loved my Nanking home and the little treasures it had con…

Chinese were born, it seemed to me, with an accumulated wisdom, a natural sophistication, an intelligent naivete, and unless they were transplanted too young, …

The wild winds had been sown and the whirlwinds were gathering... and I was reaping what I had not sown... None of us could escape the history of the centuries…

But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work.

'Living with a woman is going to be really tough. They tend to be really domesticated, you know. They fold things and clean things and know what they are going…

Housework is a treadmill from futility to oblivion with stop-offs at tedium and counter-productivity.