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.

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

For an artist to think in terms of success is like a priest trying to think in terms of success.

I envied those who could believe in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent. Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the possibility of love dying.

It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.

There's a virtue in slowness, which we have lost

Perhaps the sexual life is the great test. If we can survive it with charity to those we love and with affection to those we have betrayed, we needn't worry so much about the good and the bad in us. But jealousy, distrust, cruelty, revenge, recrimination ... then we fail. The wrong is in that failure even if we are the victims and not the executioners. Virtue is no excuse.