We have really no absent friends.

She walked about with the rather fated expression you see in photographs of girls who have subsequently been murdered, but nothing had so far happened to her.

I know that I have in my make-up layers of synthetic experiences, and that the most powerful of my memories are only half true.

The story must spring from an impression or perception pressing enough to have made the writer write. It should magnetize the imagination and give pleasure.

All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.

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.

Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.