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

All novels are experimental.

It seems priggish or pollyannaish to deny that my intention in writing the work was to titillate the nastier propensities of my readers. My own healthy inheritance of original sin comes out in the book and I enjoyed raping and ripping by proxy. It is the novelist’s innate cowardice that makes him depute to imaginary personalities the sins that he is too cautious to commit for himself.

Each man kills the thing he loves.

With both agents and publishers hungry for bestsellers, literature will have to end up as a cottage industry.

The meal was pretentious - a kind of beetroot soup with greasy croutons; pork underdone with loud vulgar cabbage, potato croquettes, tinned peas in tiny jam-tart cases, watery gooseberry sauce; trifle made with a resinous wine, so jammy that all my teeth lit up at once.

As we grow older, the memories of early life brighten, those of maturity and senescence grow dim and confused.