I know very few young people, but it seems to me that they are all possessed with an almost fatal hunger for permanence.

He had no strength for any other war than his own solitary struggle to keep alive.

That was the change in her from ten years ago; that, indeed, was her reward, this haunting, magical sadness which spoke straight to the heart and struck silence; it was the completion of her beauty.

Her heart was broken perhaps, but it was a small inexpensive organ of local manufacture. In a wider and grander way she felt things had been simplified.

I regard writing not as an investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed.

I put the words down and push them a bit.

Once you start changing a name, you see, there's no reason ever to stop. One always hears one that sounds better.