Life's only choosing when to die. Life's a big postponement because the choice is so difficult. It's a tremendous relief not to have to choose.

Rome's just a city like anywhere else. A vastly overrated city, I'd say. It trades on belief just as Stratford trades on Shakespeare.

There is a satisfactory boniness about grammar which the flesh of sheer vocabulary requires before it can become a vertebrate and walk the earth.

It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.

Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift; it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.

I didn't think; I experimented.

I wrote much because I was paid little. I had no great desire to leave a literary name behind me.