Writers were never meant to be professionals. Writing is not a profession, it is an activity, an essentially amateur occupation. It is what you do when you are not living.

There is no real escape from autobiography into biography. The self has to be faced, or we die.

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

Prudence says one thing, desire says another, and I'd rather go with desire any time.

Pride is what you can afford or think you can afford.

I have never got on with the quietist movements: they lapse too easily into self-congratulations: I have found the oneness, you have not. I prefer to look outside myself if I possibly can, not inside. Meditation reminds me too forcibly of being made to lie on a mat at nursery school and take an hour's nap.

For that is what a child should be, and seldom is, the product of man and woman, of opposing natures, unified, however temporarily, by the amazing, circling, weaving dance of love and lust and God's involvement in it.