The whole idea of interviews is in itself absurd - one cannot answer deep questions about what one's life was like - one writes novels about it.

A dance to the music of time.

Self-pity is essentially humorless, devoid of that lightness of touch which gives understanding of life.

Parents. . . are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don't fulfil the promise of their early years.

I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already.

It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.

Slowly, but very deliberately, the brooding edifice of seduction, creaking and incongruous, came into being, a vast Heath Robinson mechanism, dually controlled by them and lumbering gloomily down vistas of triteness. With a sort of heavy-fisted dexterity the mutually adapted emotions of each of them became synchronized, until the unavoidable anti-climax was at hand.