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

I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil.

I could never have been a pacifist. To kill a man was surely to grant him an immeasurable benefit. Oh yes, people always, everywhere, loved their enemies. It was their friends they preserved for pain and vacuity.

This (Vietnam) was a land of rebellious barons. It was like Europe in the Middle Ages. But what were the Americans doing here? Columbus had not yet discovered their country.

What have we all got to expect that we allow ourselves to be so lined with disappointment?

In a mad world it always seems simpler to obey.

Hatred seems to work on the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was the jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?