Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.

One goes on writing partly because it is the only available way of earning a living. It is a hard way and highly competitive. My heart drops into my bowels when I enter a bookshop and see how fierce the competition is...There is also a privier reason for pushing on, and that is the hopeless hope that someday that intractable enemy language will yield to the struggle to control it... Mastery never comes, and one serves a lifelong apprenticeship. The writer cannot retire from the battle; he dies fighting.

Death comes along like a gas bill one can't pay.

I've always felt that English women had to be approached in a sisterly manner, rather than an erotic manner.

Bath twice a day to be really clean, once a day to be passably clean, once a week to avoid being a public menace.

A man can write one book that can be great, but this doesn't make him a great writer-just the writer of a great book. . . I think a writer has to extend very widely, as well as plunge very deep, to be a great novelist.

I think art is sublimated libido. You can’t be a eunuch priest, and you can’t be a eunuch artist.