Too much success gets you resting on your laurels and creates a kind of quicksand that you can't get out of.

The exploration of oneself is usually also an exploration of the world at large, of other writers, a process of comparison with oneself with others, discoveries of kinships, gradual illumination of one's own potentialities.

The "passion for incredulity" can produce as much self-deception as the uncritical will to believe.

The self-surmounter can never put up with the man who has ceased to be dissatisfied with himself.

Sexual activity is driven by the same aims and motives as reading poetry or listening to music: to escape the limitations imposed by the need for particularity in the consciousness.

If I'd stayed on in London and carried on going to literary parties, it would have wrecked me as a writer.

Isaiah Berlin once said that there are two kinds of writers, hedgehogs and foxes. He said the fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows just one thing. So Shakespeare is a typical fox; Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky are typical hedgehogs. Now, I'm a typical hedgehog. I know just one thing, and I repeat it over and over again. I try to approach it from different angles to make it look different, but it's the same thing.