My writing, I am prepared to think, may be a substitute for something I have been born without - a so-called normal relation to society. My books are my relation to society.

No, it is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence, and once we have lost that, it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden.

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 passion of vanity has its own depths in the spirit, and is powerfully militant.

Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships; they are quite unrelatable. If you and I were capable of being altogether house-trained and made jolly, we should be nicer people, but not writers.

What's the matter with this country is the matter with the lot of us individually - our sense of personality is a sense of outrage.

the process of reading is reciprocal; the book is no more than a formula, to be furnished out with images out of the reader's mind.