I find myself increasingly shocked at the unthinking and automatic rubbishing of men which is now so part of our culture that it is hardly even noticed.

You have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.

What society doesn't realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don't now, or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared.

You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.

There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don't.

I was filled with such a dangerous delicious intoxication that I could have walked straight off the steps into the air, climbing on the strength of my own drunkeness into the stars. And the intoxication, as I knew even then, was the recklessness of infinite possibility.

I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.