Travel is like adultery: one is always tempted to be unfaithful to one's own country. To have imagination is inevitably to be dissatisfied with where you live. There is in men, as Peter Quennell said, "a centrifugal tendency." In our wanderlust, we are lovers looking for consummation.

Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.

Either a writer doesn't want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want.

We don't simply read books. We become them.

People ... have no idea what a hard job it is for two writers to be friends. Sooner or later you have to talk about each other's work.

Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.

The tension between 'yes' and no', between 'I can' and 'I cannot,' makes us feel that, in so many instances, human life is an interminable debate with one's self.