Novel-writing is a highly skilled and laborious trade. One does not just sit behind a screen jotting down other people's conversation. One has for one's raw material every single thing one has ever seen or heard or felt, and one has to go over that vast, smoldering rubbish-heap of experience, half stifled by fumes and dust, scraping and delving until one finds a few discarded valuables. Then one has to assemble these tarnished and dented fragments, polish them, set them in order, and try to make a coherent and significant arrangement of them.

One forgets words as one forgets names. One's vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.

It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one's youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates marking one's stature on the edge of the door.

Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.

When we argue for our limitations, we get to keep them.

I haven't been to sleep for over a year. That's why I go to bed early. One needs more rest if one doesn't sleep.

At first it was impressive, but after half and hour deadly monotonous. It was like everything German - overdone.