To walk into history is to be free at once, to be at large among people.

Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.

Dialogue in fiction is what characters do to one another.

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.

Two things are terrible in childhood: helplessness (being in other people's power) and apprehension - the apprehension that something is being concealed from us because it is too bad to be told.

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

With no banal reassuring grown-ups present, with grown-up intervention taken away, there is no limit to the terror strange children feel of each other, a terror life obscures but never ceases to justify. There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.