My father and I were never intimate in the sense of my coming to him with confidences or seeking advice. Our relationship was rather that of host and guest. Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.

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.

No one is ever holy without suffering.

I do not believe the expenditure of $2.50 for a book entitles the purchaser to the personal friendship of the author.

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

Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.'-William Boot

I don't believe that people would ever fall in love or want to be married if they hadn't been told about it. It's like abroad: no one would want to go there if they hadn't been told it existed.