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.

without fiction, either life would be insufficient or the winds from the north would blow too cold.

we can surmount the anger we feel. To find oneself like a young tree inside a tomb is to discover the power to crack the tomb and grow up to any height.

No one of the characters in my novels has originated, so far as I know, in real life. If anything, the contrary was the case: persons playing a part in my life--the first twenty years of it--had about them something semi-fictitious.

Sins cut boldly up through every class in society, but mere misdemeanours show a certain level in life.

Style is the thing that's always a bit phony, and at the same time you cannot write without style.

Someone soon to start on a journey is always a little holy.