MGM bores me when I see them, but I don't see them much. They have been a help in getting me introductions to morticians, who are the only people worth knowing.

I am annoyed to find myself continually described by people whom I have never set eyes on as bad-tempered.

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.

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

O God, if there is a God, forgive him his sins, if there is such a thing as sin.

I'm quite deaf now; such a comfort.

Beware of writing to me. I always answer ... My father spent the last 20 years of his life writing letters. If someone thanked him for a wedding present, he thanked them for thanking him and there was no end to the exchange but death.