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

All fates are ‘worse than death’.

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.

But in the dying world I come from quotation is a national vice. No one would think of making an after-dinner speech without the help of poetry. It used to be the classics, now it’s lyric verse.

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

My children weary me. I can only see them as defective adults: feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humorless.

You can't ever tell what's going to hurt people.