Each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant; impossible socially, but full scale; and it's the knockings and battering we sometimes hear in each other that keep our banter from utter banality.

Certain books come to meet me, as do people.

After inside upheavals, it is important to fix on imperturbable things. Their imperturbableness, their air that nothing has happened renews our guarantee.

All my life I have said, "Whatever happens there will always be tables and chairs"--and what a mistake.

The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet - when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round.

Everything is very quiet, the streets are never crowded, and the people one dislikes are out of town.

I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.