After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies.

In 1952, I had gone to England on a literary pilgrimage, but what I also saw, even at that distance from the blitz, were bombed-out ruins and an enervated society, while the continent was still, psychologically, in the grip of its recent atrocities.

I read in order to write. I read out of obsession with writing.

I can't claim to be disenchanted "with the current state of fiction" because I read so little of it. My reading is mostly drawn to history.

The butterfly lures us not only because he is beautiful, but because he is transitory. The caterpillar is uglier, but in him we can regard the better joy of becoming.

What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.

Time at length becomes justice.