There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in...We should be thankful we cannot see the horrors and degradations lying around our childhood, in cupboards and bookshelves, everywhere.

Ordinary life goes on--that has saved many a man's reason.

Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel; sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust.

They had been corrupted by money, and he had been corrupted by sentiment. Sentiment was the more dangerous, because you couldn’t name its price. A man open to bribes was to be relied upon below a certain figure, but sentiment might uncoil in the heart at a name, a photograph, even a smell remembered.

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

The world doesn't make any heroes anymore.

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