Fumbling for a word is everybody's birthright.

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

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

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

To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.

I mean, there's little enough in this life, really, and you only find it worth living for the odd moments, and if you think you're going to have those odd moments again, then it makes life wonderful and have a meaning.

A character, to be acceptable as more than a chess piece, has to be ignorant of the future, unsure about the past, and not at all sure of what he's supposed to be doing.