We are all of us resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.

With a novel, which takes perhaps years to write, the author is not the same man he was at the end of the book as he was at the beginning. It is not only that his characters have developed-he has developed with them, and this nearly always gives a sense of roughness to the work: a novel can seldom have the sense of perfection which you find in Chekhov's story, The Lady with the Dog.

Grief and disappointment are like hate: they make men ugly with self-pity and bitterness. And how selfish they make us too.

Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair.

Oh, I’m not a Berkeleian. I believe my back’s against this wall. I believe there’s a sten gun over there.

You cannot conceive, nor can I, of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.

All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.