For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.

For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.

Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.

And it does no harm to repeat, as often as you can, 'Without me the literary industry would not exist: the publishers, the agents, the sub-agents, the sub-sub-agents, the accountants, the libel lawyers, the departments of literature, the professors, the theses, the books of criticism, the reviewers, the book pages- all this vast and proliferating edifice is because of this small, patronized, put-down and underpaid person.'

It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.

What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to say, 'Oh, what this really is is so-and-so,' reducing it to a simple formula.

In fact I've reached the stage where I look at people and say - he or she, they are whole at all because they've chosen to block off at this stage or that. People stay sane by blocking off, by limiting themselves.