Never to lie is to have no lock on your door, you are never wholly alone.

I do like Italian graves; they look so much more lived in.

Memory must be patchy; what is more alarming is its face-savingness. Something in one shrinks from catching it out - unique to oneself, one's own, one's claim to identity, it implicates one's identity in its fibbing.

Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships; they are quite unrelatable. If you and I were capable of being altogether house-trained and made jolly, we should be nicer people, but not writers.

The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.

My writing, I am prepared to think, may be a substitute for something I have been born without - a so-called normal relation to society. My books are my relation to society.

nobody ever dies of an indignity.