At the age of twelve I was finding the world too small: it appeared to me like a dull, trim back garden, in which only trivial games could be played.

Proust has pointed out that the predisposition to love creates its own objects; is this not also true of fear?

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

[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.

In big houses in which things are done properly, there is always the religious element. The diurnal cycle is observed with more feeling when there are servants to do the work.

Don't you understand that all language is dead currency? How they keep on playing shop with it all the same.

Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.