Yet this perhaps is what love does, or the memory of it; it sucks the life from the living, glorying body and leaves it, when love has gone, a shred, a simulacrum - dross, to be swept up from the factory floor, pitiful and dusty, useless... Do all men and women feel love before they die? This force, this source of light, that lies before the sun; glances off mountains and lakes, blinding and dazzling, on a Sunday afternoon; so brilliant you have to guard your soul, fold your arms to shield your heart from the very memory of it.

I learned that sex was not a question of victory or defeat, of pleasure or profit: of a hand's manipulation and a physical response: I learned that in its purest pleasure it belongs to neither of those who practise it, in the same way as a child belongs to neither parent: it is a free spirit: it simply exists.

Confidence is something one acquires. It can come early or late but it is impossible to write without it. Mine came late.

Poverty is a stubborn thing: you seldom escape it with one bound.

Nowadays most people wear black most of the time anyway: go to a literary party and one would imagine everyone there was in perpetual mourning for their lives.

The prophets of doom, in my experience, are generally ignored and usually right.

memory is so selective; wishful thinking presses it into service all the time.