Words are not simple things: they take unto themselves, as they have through time, power and meaning.

one tends to suspect others of what one is guilty of oneself. The unfaithful wife is quick to suspect the husband of infidelity.

Take me! Well, not quite take me, love me now, take me eventually

Youth gives a sense of new days dawning bright, going on for ever, and a kind of tamped-down excitement which keeps breaking through even the worst days of poverty, depression and loneliness. But then youth is something which only exists in retrospect; you are barely conscious of it while you have it.

Fiction, on the whole, and if it is any good, tends to be a subversive element in society.

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

Never defend yourself; agree with your critics, it takes the wind out of their sails.