I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.

The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended.

The individual appears for an instant, joins the community of thought, modifies it and dies; but the species, that dies not, reaps the fruit of his ephemeral existence.

They took to silence. They touched each other without comment and without progression. A hand on a hand, a clothed arm, resting on an arm. An ankle overlapping an ankle, as they sat on a beach, and not removed. One night they fell asleep, side by side... He slept curled against her back, a dark comma against her pale elegant phrase.

I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the second world war.

History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself.

I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.