Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.

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

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.

...the essential intention is the real sin. A man who cannot choose ceases to be a man.

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

You don't say, 'I've done it!' You come, with a kind of horrible desperation, to realize that this will do.

Immortality makes sense only when the individual soul can be thought of as merging into a great collective mush of sainthood. If we take anything with us into the next world, it is not what survives in the memories of our relicts.