All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.

One cat just leads to another. The place is so damned big it doesn't really seem as though there were many cats until you see them all moving like a mass migration at feeding time.

My father was a deeply sentimental man. And like all sentimental men, he was also very cruel.

When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.

No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.

One battle doesn't make a campagin, but critics treat one book, good or bad, like a whole war.

Read anything I write for the pleasure of reading it. Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you brought to the reading.