whenever possible I avoid talking. Reprieve from talking is my idea of a holiday. At risk of seeming unsociable, which I am, I admit I love to be left in a beatific trance, when I am in one. Friendly Romans recognize that wish.

If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.

Temperamentally, the writer exists on happenings, on contacts, conflicts, action and reaction, speed, pressure, tension. Were he acontemplative purely, he would not write.

There's something so showy about desperation, it takes hard wits to see it's a grandiose form of funk.

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.

... artists were intended to be an ornament to society. As a society in themselves they are unthinkable.

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