Raids are slightly constipating.

rudeness to Mrs. Dosely was like dropping a pat of butter on to a hot plate - it slid and melted away.

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.

Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.

Imagination of my kind is most caught, most fired, most worked upon by the unfamiliar: I have thrivenon the changes and chances, the dislocations andcontrasts which have made up so much of my life.

First love, with its frantic haughty imagination, swings its object clear of the everyday, over the rut of living, making him all looks, silences, gestures, attitudes, a burning phrase with no context.

writers do not find subjects: subjects find them. There is not so much a search as a state of open susceptibility.